Over the year I’ve seen a number of domain names that I was interested in get picked up by someone else and often wondered what’s to stop someone or some bot (perhaps at the whois/registrar site itself) from scanning people’s searches for domain names and registering them. After all, those searches at minimum appear in server logs, so somewhere there’s a record of the domain names you’re interested in, and these could be weighted based on how often you check them—so a domain name that might seem "hot" could get grabbed before you get your chance.
Sound paranoid? Tonight this Slashdot article outlines this very scenario. The original article that Slashdot points to calls these people(?) "domain tasters" and claims that there are severe leaks in the domain name system. And that’s it’s been going on for quite awhile.
Slightly more paranoid than me. Something to think about, though.
On a slightly related note, does anyone else have a hard time taking ".info" domains seriously? (Or any other non .com, .net, .org domains, for that matter…) Right now GoDaddy has them available for $2.99, which is killer cheap, but it seems almost like… I don’t know, like giving up, maybe. Or am I just being elitist?
Some folks I work for, in an attempt to make sure nobody squatted on their name, had me register the .net, .org, .cc, .info, .tv, .mobi, .ws, .biz, .us, and .name in addition to the .com. Why? Because a local competitor got the .travel for the domain and they wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again.
Personally, if it ain’t .net, .com, or .org, it’s fairly irrelevant to me, as normal folks just aren’t going to pay attention (I still see people who see web site addresses on TV that are like "tnt.tv" and they’re like "what’s a dot-tee-vee?").