If you're concerned about frontrunning, use <a href="http://instantdomainsearch.com" rel="nofollow">http://instantdomainsearch.com</a>. It was written by YC alum Beau Hartshorne, and I can personally vouch for his trustworthiness. We use it every batch to find new names for startups.
The article says to not check if the domain you are interesting in resolves, because ISPs sell the data on resolution failures. I have two questions about that.<p>1. That seems to assume that one is using their ISPs DNS service. What if I'm querying the top level .com servers directly? Is that safe?<p>2. Even if you are using your ISPs DNS servers, if they are getting that data from their logs and selling it I'd expect there would be a fair delay before the data got to some third party that would act on it. That should make it safe if your intent is to buy the domain soon, shouldn't it?
Hey, this is a valuable "domain name customer protection measure". Says so right here in the class action lawsuit notification I got from network solutions:<p><i></i><i>Dear Network Solutions Customer,<p>Earlier this year, we notified you of the settlement of a class action lawsuit brought against Network Solutions® in connection with our domain name customer protection measure that was discontinued last year.<p>Today, we are pleased to announce that the court has officially approved the settlement and as result, you are being issued a $6.00 credit applicable to any Network Solutions product or service purchased on the Network Solutions website, valid for one year from the date of the issuance of the credit. Your credit is equal to $6 per qualifying domain name registered through Network Solutions. For example, if you registered two qualifying domains you can expect to receive a credit of $12.00.<p>A qualifying domain name is one that was (i) searched for through Network Solutions on or between December 14, 2007 and March 15, 2008, (ii) reserved by Network Solutions under our customer protection measure, (iii) registered by you through Network Solutions within the same internet session used for the domain availability search, and (iv) not previously refunded.<p>You can use your credit to register domain names, get reliable Web hosting, create a website, secure your existing site & more.<p>To take advantage of your credit, follow these simple steps:<p>Visit www.networksolutions.com and select the product(s)
you wish to purchase.
In the shopping cart, click ‘Redeem Offer Code’.
Enter coupon code XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYX then click ‘Continue’.
Your discount will be reflected in the shopping cart.
Please note that this settlement does not in any way impact the domain names that you registered, or the terms of domain names you have registered. No action is necessary on your part.<p>Sincerely,<p>Network Solutions® Customer Support</i><i></i><p>/sarcasm
I have two rules when searching for domains.<p>First, I never search for a complete name. I use www.namedroppers.com that allows partial name searches. E.g. if I'm looking for 'coolwidgets', I'd search for "olwidge".<p>And second, if I see a potentially interesting domain, I grab it right away, without any worries about the cost -- I'll just drop it a year later if I don't need it.
I once completed the sale of zioo.com on GoDaddy. I'd managed to hand-register the name for the regular registration price. The money came off my credit card and everything. About an hour later, I got an email saying "sorry, we didn't really get the name, here's your money back"<p>I was positively gutted.<p>(For those who don't know the domain space 4 letter pronouncable dot-coms are often valued in the five digit range ($xx,xxx) - that one probably just a few thousand but still a good ROI vs. $10 to register. I'd have been happy to build something fun on it.)<p>There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that Godaddy does steal names from searches. I spend a lot of time working in the domain space and I hear about it from the pros from time to time.
Is this actually a significant problem anymore? No doubt front running was a pretty significant practice historically, but I haven't run into the practice in quite some time. At the peak of tasting practices more than 9 in 10 domains were given back during the cooling off period. That number has dropped dramatically since the rules were changed.<p>While I'm sure a bit of front running must still go on, it's hard for me to believe it happens to the average joe much if ever. In that light the rules that page lay out sound pretty over the top, and I'm generally a pretty paranoid person. I'd only worry about front running today if I was a known high value target, one who buys or holds a lot of domains. If that was me, I'd just take some mild precautions. Don't use my registrar to search for domains, clear tracking cookies before searching. The implications that you can't trust your ISP DNS system, search engines and certain whois services sounds like '06-'08 logic to me.
I don't know about you, but the prevalence of this has made "picking a domain" something I only do when I'm buying the domain these days. As in, from search to buy, it's a few seconds.
I went to find a domain name for personal use a few years ago, using yahoo business DNS (they were running a special on 5 year pricing). When I decided on one I liked, I noticed the .com of it was already poached (site was the usual garbage filler). So I bought the .org.<p>By the time I closed an paid for the DNS the .net and all other variations had been bought and were directing to those generic filler pages. I can only hope that which ever group poached those wasted some amount of time, effort, or money. I don't run a business from it, and never intend to, but I can see how this kind of shady behavior would warent paranoia from those looking to run a business around a given DNS (/corresponding business name).
You cannot even trust registrars (netsol and godaddy are prime examples).<p>Spend a few hours and write your own code to do direct registry searches through the whois telnet query.<p>I wrote one myself, it's not that hard and you'll learn a bit.
This article stops short of actually explaining how to interpret the text output. I just did a lookup on a domain I'm interested in, and I <i>think</i> it's expired -- it's registered with Tucows and it shows two expiry dates (XX-Mar-2011 and XX-mar-2012). This is kinda fishy since I checked the day before it was set to expire (~2 weeks ago) and the output never said anything about 2012. My gut tells me Tucows has renewed it for their client (or slyly making it <i>seem</i> like it's renewed). So... can I grab it yet?
It might be fun to F with godaddy.com and start pumping them randomly with domains. Mixing random words in the dictionary and trying combinations in sequence like a typical user would would be effective.<p>Set this up to happen on a daily basis through proxy servers for different ips, and you might create an interesting way to bleed them a little bit.<p>Record the domains entered, and see how many times you get them to nick you. It would make for a fun blog post.<p>Keep in mind, they have to pay ever time they register a domain.
This recently happened me and I posted a thread about it here on HN. Godaddy responded to an angry tweet of mine, saying that they don't pursue this practice and asked if the domain was listed with their "privacy service". When they didn't respond to my reply to that, I emailed them. Customer relations replied that the domain is protected by their "privacy service" and they can't reveal who bought it, speculating it was an "individual".
I've been poached rather differently - I formed a limited liability company, and found that as soon as my formation was made official, someone had registered "$mycompanyname.com". Foolish on my part I suppose.<p>I do find it rather odd that the owner isn't responding to contact via the whois record - seems an odd sort of extortion where they don't want to take your money.
Does anyone know if <a href="http://domize.com" rel="nofollow">http://domize.com</a> is a front runner? They claim on their website they are not, but would like to hear users experience if this is not the case.
I always use <a href="http://dynadot.com" rel="nofollow">http://dynadot.com</a>, I've never had a single problem with them registering what I'm searching for, and their interface is awesomely simple.
A friend of mine who has 800+ domains was searching for a name for his company on godaddy and found one he liked. He spoke to his business partner that evening and they agreed on the name.<p>The next day he went to register it and found that it was taken... by godaddy.<p>Godaddy then set it as a "premium domain" and changed the price to $500.<p>He was pissed.<p>He accepted the version of the domain with a '-' between the two words instead. He recently emailed godaddy and let them know that he has 800+ domains with them, explained what happened and said "I would like the domain that you took, unethically, for the regular domain registration price that all available domains go for or I will take my ~$9,000 in annual renewal fees to another registrar.<p>He has not heard back from godaddy. But he switched his searches aways from them.<p>I on the otherhand, typically only search for a domain if I am willing to spend the 10 right then to grab it.