GoDaddy selling your name searches?

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ulasbbtr

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One week ago I was making some searches after the late midnight hours. Checked it at godaddy, it was available. I was so sleepy that I decided to purchase it in the following day. Morning (early afternoon :) ), I checked the name and surprised that it was registered. That would be OK someone discovered it too, there are lots of domainers. I checked the whois it was showing a registrar that I don't know, still couldn't remember its name. In the info it shows name created at JAN 1 2008, etc no admin contact information.

One day later I checked the whois info again, that was same, only shows registrar creation date, but still no contact info. Also at internic there was no information available. And today I checked the name again to discover whom registered the name. It is strange this time creation of the domain was changed like the following:
Creation Date: 04-jan-2008
Expiration Date: 04-jan-2009
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.

I read some things about Godaddy's selling your search history to firms. This experience made me somewhat sure about that action. Probably they held the name for themselves for two days, and then sold to someone else. I don't know what happened in the background, but there is a bad smell for me.
 
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I've never regd via godaddy, only take pushes/but tdnam names so personally i've never experienced this problem, but I would put it past a big company like godaddy to do something like this.

You could always search for a bunch of crappy names with no value but which might look good, and see if they get regd, may or may not work lol. I preffer using whois sites such as iwhois.com to search for available names, then i just go and reg em and dont tell a soul until its regd and in my account, that way no risk of someone you tell sniping it from under your nose.
 
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stub said:
I wouldn't be so sure. I have seen complaints about there whois lookups too.

Although registrar's whois lookup MIGHT be compromised by a third party. I still think the most likely explanation is they are getting the information from Verisign. I would very much doubt that GoDaddy are "stealing" domains searched but not registered.


ICANN, have asked domainers to send info. I contacted them 3 times, with a screan shot I took with my camera, showing the name that some reg, a few days after I checked to see if it was free.

I found an offical form on another forum, explained what happened, thay did not even respond. SO HOW SERIOUS ARE THAY IN CATCHING THESE PEOPLE.

As for the lookups, thay to are being patroled, there is plent of threads on every forums relating to this
 
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co2 said:
SO HOW SERIOUS ARE THAY IN CATCHING THESE PEOPLE.
They're currently gathering whatever "proof" there is. Don't expect any "instant"
action.
 
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TT said:
Just another reason NOT to use GODADDY for anything..... Thay have to be the worst registrar on the planet.... Sorry Bob your a great guy but your business ethics suck

Could you please explain to someone who has regged over 200 names with Godaddy how its the worst service out there?
 
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I see these posts all the time. I do not think Godaddy does it...I think it is all very speculative. I think it is either upstream or downstream from the major registrars.

Slashdot posted an article about this and there are a lot of good responses:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/28/1458247
 
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It's old news, here is what I've found. Tim Ruiz, who is the vice president of corporate development and policy planning for the GoDaddy.com officially confessed that WHOIS domain searches of GoDaddy's clients are being monitored by someone and domain ideas get stolen just in couple of days.

Here is his public speaking at ICANN Meetings in Marrakech, Morocco (27 June 2006):

There's -- I'd now like to pass the microphone to Tim Ruiz from go daddy, who is the vice president of corporate development and policy planning for the Go Daddy group.
>>TIM RUIZ: Thank you, Jonathan.
As I stated earlier, godaddy does feel that using the add-grace period for domain-tasting is a problem.
That is an abuse.
There's been a lot of debate about the economics of that.
That's not our concern.
It's not our concern that somebody's getting something for free.
I think there are some legitimate questions that need to be asked in that regard.
But what our primary concern is, that it's creating customer confusion, that it's threatening consumer confidence in our industry, and that it's costing -- it's causing increased support costs for registrars, definitely for Go Daddy.
We've talked to other registrars just informally.
We'll let them speak for themselves.
But indications are that other registrars are beginning to see similar problems.
So the kinds of support issues that this is creating and the kind of confusion that this activity is creating I'll let registrars -- our customers speak for themselves by just sharing with you a few of the written complaints that we've received from customers.
This first one was directed to our CEO, Bob parsons.
And the customer says, hi, Bob, I've been doing business with you for many years.
On Friday, I checked the availability of something.com from your site as I always do.
It was available.
I had my meeting with the store owner and promised to buy the domain name for him today.
I ran the availability of it again this morning from your site and imagine my surprise when the domain showed as being unavailable and sold to some obscure registrar, and he names the registrar.
I do not believe this is coincidence.
I believe in my heart that you've got someone in your camp that's giving information to someone that's speculating on domain names.
I really hope that you -- you're the kind of person I've always assumed are you and this situation is one you take seriously.
Well, we did take it seriously.
We spent a lot of time investigating this situation, in fact, close to five days working with this customer.
Ultimately, we were able to get the domain name that they were afternoon because it was dropped after it had been tasted for five days.
Another comment, complaint, actually.
I've personally searched on several names which have absolutely no meaning whatsoever.
We assume no anybody else but himself.
All were stolen by some registrar and parsed out to their various subcompanies.
They eventually dropped within a few days.
Either someone internal to your company and/or someone who is in charge of the entire WHOIS system of queries and/or somewhere along the way some bot or worm is intercepting these queries.
Somehow, in some way, these queries are being intercepted and used to some registrars' benefit.
They know it, you know it, we all know it, ICANN knows it.
It's time to put the legal folks with the U.S. government on this.
This has gone too long and too far.
No resolution to the domain names that he was concerned about.
They all dropped, so I would assume that he was able to eventually acquire them.
And, finally, I used to be a proud go-daddy customer.
I registered and bought both a domain name and a hosting space there.
Since I searched for my second domain acquisition in the WHOIS box at Godaddy's site, even after entering my customer I.D. and password five days ago, and tried to make it effective on Tuesday, it came that the dot com I queried and found available the previous Saturday was already registered, delegated, and active since the day after by, and it names some registrar.
I was registering my boss's company name.
He was trying to understand what all that was about.
He doesn't speak English, doesn't trade with credit cards, so had I to accomplish the task.
And he couldn't believe his trademark was registered.
Obvious questions: What, why, how?
What can we do?
Fortunately, in this case, we were able to help the customer get the domain name.
So these are the kinds of things that we're seeing on the rise.
We're not seeing, you know, hundreds of these on a daily basis.
We're seeing probably tens on a weekly basis, but much more than we've ever seen before and related to this activity in the add-grace period.
As this activity continues to grow, we suspect this type of issue is going to grow, this type of confusion is going to grow and our long-term concern is it's going to erode confidence in our industry and what we do for a business.
Those are our concerns.
We feel, you know, there's been some discussion about policy development processes to solve this.
For us, that would be an unfortunate step to have to take, not because we don't have confidence in the policy development process, but, quite honestly, it's resource-intensive, it's time-consuming, and we feel that the tools already exist to put an end to this activity in the add-grace period.
And, again, this isn't about a problem we have with monetization.
We don't feel if we stop this activity in the add-grace period it's going to solve all the problems we're talking about here today.
But it will solve, we believe, the problems that we're seeing right now with customers being confused and losing confidence in what we're doing.

Source: http://www.icann.org/meetings/marrakech/captioning-dn-27jun06.htm
 
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That is a really great speach by Tim Ruiz. It really seems like they are on our side here, and I hope that everyone bad mouthing Godaddy does take the time to read that post.

Thanks for sharing :) +Rep
 
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It is not illegal. Any search you do is in plain text and can be viewed/sniffed antwhere you hop through. Not much can be done. :imho:
 
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OK lets try this, Check availability for blibberschnitz dot com and blibber-schnitz dot com. Lets see if these get tasted :) domaintools shows these have never been registered
 
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Diabro said:
It is not illegal. Any search you do is in plain text and can be viewed/sniffed antwhere you hop through. Not much can be done. :imho:

True, may not be illegal itself. If, however, a company's CEO comes out and publicly says that they are not selling searches, it would become illegal if they in fact were.
 
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Avensen said:
It's old news, here is what I've found. Tim Ruiz, who is the vice president of corporate development and policy planning for the GoDaddy.com officially confessed that WHOIS domain searches of GoDaddy's clients are being monitored by someone and domain ideas get stolen just in couple of days.

Tim doesn't actually admit anything there. He's just stating what his client's have said and then leaves it dangling.

That was in 2006 and still ICANN sitting on the fence with this registration grace period. That's probably because their contract with Verisign allows them to sell these searches. We all know what a one sided agreement that was. Every other competitor for the .com/.net contract were offering to REDUCE pricing, not get an automatic 7% increase every couple of years, and a contract with automatic renewals.
 
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Sleepys said:
True, may not be illegal itself. If, however, a company's CEO comes out and publicly says that they are not selling searches, it would become illegal if they in fact were.
As long as it wasn't in any company policies and he was not under oath I would not think it is. :imho:

But I do not think THEY are doing it. I think it is somewhere else. All registrars get accused of this. I do not see how much they could make off of this.
 
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I guess that in a buisness such as ours and the amount of domains that get reg every day, there will always be problems with which ever company you use, I also hear horror stories of names getting hijacked so to speak!

Over my time in the domain world, I have decided to stick with 3 company's for reg my names. I also think that a company like godaddy, as big as they are, they do have some very strange ethics!! But i'm sure it happens all over the place.
 
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Actually you could try an interesting experiment, try searching for a few stupid things like supercoolmegawidgets.com or anything else you can come up with that'll have no value, then whois a day or two later, to see if they're getting "tasted" for traffic by GoDaddy.
 
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That experiment has been done already. One of the tasters was Chesterton Holdings. Someone searched for ChestertonSucks.com. It got regged and subsequently dropped. Probably because we didn't follow through and hit the site hard when it was being tasted ;)
 
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Ive asked them directly this question, here's the reply.
Discussion Notes
Support Staff Response
Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for contacting Online Support. It appears that you ware inquiring as to the status of a domain that you search for, but do not purchase. When you search for a domain name, it searches the WhoIs database, which is a publicly available forum to determine the availability. Any domain name can be purchased by anyone at any time. We suggest purchasing domains soon after searching to determine their availability. Please note that we do not sell these search results. Please let us know if we can assist you in any other way.

Best regards,
//removed//
Online Support Representative
Customer Inquiry
hi
if i use any of your whois on domainrightnow.com or in godaddy.com are you selling the results of it? is someone spying on my domain searches for availability?

ulasbbtr said:
One week ago I was making some searches after the late midnight hours. Checked it at godaddy, it was available. I was so sleepy that I decided to purchase it in the following day. Morning (early afternoon :) ), I checked the name and surprised that it was registered. That would be OK someone discovered it too, there are lots of domainers. I checked the whois it was showing a registrar that I don't know, still couldn't remember its name. In the info it shows name created at JAN 1 2008, etc no admin contact information.

One day later I checked the whois info again, that was same, only shows registrar creation date, but still no contact info. Also at internic there was no information available. And today I checked the name again to discover whom registered the name. It is strange this time creation of the domain was changed like the following:
Creation Date: 04-jan-2008
Expiration Date: 04-jan-2009
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.

I read some things about Godaddy's selling your search history to firms. This experience made me somewhat sure about that action. Probably they held the name for themselves for two days, and then sold to someone else. I don't know what happened in the background, but there is a bad smell for me.
 
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Whoa, maybe they do! I was looking for a typo name that was available yesterday, but not today!
 
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domainer50 said:
Whoa, maybe they do! I was looking for a typo name that was available yesterday, but not today!

Who is the owner !!??, have thay been caught out.
 
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I will try this myself, i'll even do a bulk search and see how many of them get taken. Ill get back to you on this.
 
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Electric-Shadow said:
I will try this myself, i'll even do a bulk search and see how many of them get taken. Ill get back to you on this.


Hay E-S, how did the little experiment go, co2
 
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