Do Domain Name Registries Steal Your Great Names?

Hypothesis: Some domain registries cherry pick through names queried and register them.

Conclusion: Probably not.

Given that:

• domain registration services have unreadable terms of use,
• the site owner do just about anything with any data you provide,
• you (or any user) have put your creative energy into figuring out cool names,
• human nature is to wait before comitting to a name,
• it’s valuable to have the name you want or found creative

So, it seems like one way to make money to camp on any interesting names that people look up on your site.

The hypothesis is that sometime in the day after you look at a cool name, it gets registered.

To test this, I tried looking up a number of adjective-noun combinations on a number of lookup sites. For each service, I tried two different unregistered domain names, e.g., SnappyGrunge.com or SlickThunder.com. I waited a couple days, tried again with the same service, then waited a week and checked with nslookup.

I tried these domains: SnappyGrunge.com, SlickThunder.com, SnappyThunder.com, SlickSlime.com, SlickThunder.com, GrabPottery.com, GrabFudge.com, GrabThinker.com, SnappyFudge.com, SlickGrunge.com, GrabGrunge.com, TakeThunder.com, SnappySlime.com, TakeFudge.com, SlickPottery.com, GrabThunder.com, HappySlime.com, GrabThinker.com, HappyGrunge.com, SlickFudge.com, HappyThunder.com, TakeThinker.com, SnappyGrab.com, TakeGrunge.com, YellowSounds.com, YellowHarvest.com, BrickTeens.com, FloppySounds.com, BrickSounds.com, FloppyHarvest.com, EdgeCup.com

Two at each of these registry services: DNSStuff.com, ZoneEdit.com, DNSWatch.com, Bankes.Com, Register.com, GoDaddy.com, NetworkSolutions.com, Active-domain.com, Secure.OnlineAccess.net, 101Domain.com, DomainDirect.com

There were no results in which these domains were registered. There were a few irreproducible results: GoDaddy.com initially reported that the two domains (GrabGrunge.com and GrabThunder.com) were taken, but did not report this a week later. Google.com/a reported the same with SlickPottery.com. A few of the fly by night sites (bankes.com, Secure.OnlineAccess.net) were not responding for one phase of the tests. None of the domains was registered after a week.

It was an experiment. It told us this wasn’t a problem.