Domain name idea gazumping: Coincidence or Bot theft?

[Poita]

Hi.

I had a skype discussion with a friend recently and we brainstormed a domain name. We settled on a name we liked . . . . let's say for the sake of argument that it was 'treeable.com' Then we did a search for it both in the browser address bar and with an availability search service http://whois.net/ and it was definitely available.
Then I decided to mull the name over for a week and see if I like it enough. So after deciding that I liked it I went to register it with Godaddy only to find that it had already been registered.

It seems that we came up with the .com name on May 13th and it was registered by someone else 48 hours later on May 15th.

So my question is: are there people or bots that have access to the input of people's searches for domain availability and who use this facility to grab names before those who searched for them? Or . . . is it possible that we came up with a name that had not been registered over the last twenty years and leading up to that point but 'coincidentally' someone thought of the same name two days later and happened to register it?
I know crazy coincidences happen but human chicanery happens more often in my experience so I naturally feel suspicious but would really appreciate any input on this.

I'm not looking for comments that I should have registered it on the day I thought of it as that's very obvious.
Also, I found the guy who did register it and emailed him offering him $100 for it and he replied that he was planning on using the name but would let me know if that changed so it seems he's not parking it for the sake of it.

 

[discobull]

Maybe your friend is not really such a great friend?

 

[Heartbeat]

offer him a $1000..may be works :p

 

[Poita]

He is a good friend. I don't call people my friend unless I know their moral compass without doubt.
Also, I contacted the guy in a different country who has the name.

I talked to a guy from Godaddy about it and he made a good point. He said if it were possible for people or bots to snoop domain name idea searches then companies like Godaddy would use that fact to scare people to register their ideas immediately rather than waiting.

So I guess it was a crazy coincidence.

 

[DomainGnome]

I use the www.internic.net/whois.html for most of my searches, just to avoid this kind of stuff. The nice thing is, nobody monitors that whois to steal domain ideas (in fact, at the bottom of the page it reads, "This page last updated 10/22/2001"). Not sure anyone ever uses it besides me, actually.

The new whois that covers all the new tld's is in beta and sometimes doesn't work well for me. That one is at http://whois.icann.org/ - once it's past beta it's going to be quite helpful.

 

[chenzen]

It could have been a bot monitoring your searches and registered by a "human" after manually reviewing the searches and finding it worth to register.
Probably he would delete the domain just before the "Deletion period" gets over so that he gets back his reg fee IF YOU DIDN'T make him any offer. Or probably he really liked the domain name.
Anyhow, you have already made the grave mistake of offering him to buy the domain. Now he is going to play with you to get as much as possible from you since he knows you are really serious.
If I were you, I would think of an another domain name (assuming that you are just trying to find a brandable domain) and just move on. And this time, register it as soon as you done thinking!

 

[Poita]

Update to my post.

I consulted some people in the industry and they were sure it was more likely to be a coincidence than a conspiracy. A guy at Godaddy sales made a good point: if it were possible for people to log your searches and steal your domain idea then companies like Godaddy would use that information to scare people into registering sooner so the fact they don't put that in their marketing means it probably doesn't happen.

I thought of name that I liked much more actually and registered the hell out of it as soon as I got all the similar ones and other extensions too just to be sure.

Something else occurred to me too. When I weighed the likelihood of it being a 48 hour coincidence over someone monitoring my search and gazumping me on the registration it seemed pretty weighted on the conspiracy over coincidence but I realised I was just calculating the number of days, months and years that the internet has been up and available to take domain name registrations but actually not all days are equal. The two days that passed since I thought of the name and someone registered it are not equal to say, two days in the late 90's as there will be an exponentially larger number of people coming up with names and registering them in a two day period 2014 than there would have been in the same 48 hours in 1998. It's still a long shot but if you imagine a graph of this being like a tornado with each layer representing one day of the last twenty years of the internet then 2010 to today probably had just as many registrations as the whole of 1994 to 2010. So the coincidence of someone coming up with the same domain name idea a 48 hour period out of 8 years is a lot easier to believe than in 20 or more years. Still a coincidence but perhaps within believability.

 

[AEProgram]

http://www.billhartzer.com/pages/network-solutions-registering-domains-after-availability-lookup/

Obviously your case is different but never underestimate what some do in this business.