GoDaddy Spies???

[pixelbugnyc]

Ok, so here's something I've always wondered about and now that it's actually happened to me, I'm looking into it even further... hope others who have had similar experiences could come forward and contribute as well.

Here's the question, when we are online looking up the availability of domains, are others watching? Is there someone on the other side of the screen looking at everything we are researching? Waiting for something good to come about only to yank it from under our feet...

This past Saturday the 12th, I went online to Godaddy.com to see if a list of domains were available... the one domain i was really crossing my fingers for was a domain appropriate for an adult site (hornyDoll.com). I have had this domain written in my little book for sometime now. I have had other domains that took priority to this one so I have held back in registering this one for some time now. (Lesson learned: never wait!)

Anyways, On Saturday i entered the domain to check if it was available and it was. At the time of purchase my connection with Godaddy kept failing. i tried connecting a few times but had no luck in doing so. I gave up and went about my day, thinking i would do it later that evening. What with the holiday weekend, I ended up going away and not attending to this til today.

When i went to register it, it was taken. Now, lets look at the domain (hornydoll.com) last i checked, the two words in conjunction have not popped up in the news. there is no real thing as a product called a "hornydoll". No logical reason to believe why anyone would be in a race to have this domain registered. it came to me and i would be damned if the same thing popped into someones head on the same DAY!

i looked up WHOIS and i found out it was registered on the same day as i made the attempt to purchase. In the past when ive been with godaddy on the phone, i know they have access to "view our actions" as we do them on our account. did someone there see what i was registering and took it from me? why did my connection stall? is it possible that some "hack" has invaded "domainer's" computers only to spy on what they are trying to register? i cant help but to feel paranoid now. how can it possibly happen that two people were both looking for the same word at the same time?

Here's another bit of info that makes you think even more... the company that registered the domain does "predictive data analysis"

Is there anyone who works in legal who can chime in on this?

if anyone has any comments, please post it. id' like to hear what others think about what is going on. thanks!

 

[markmiddleton]

Although my view has toned down a bit since I posted here:

http://www.discussnames.com/showthread.php?t=17520

I had been out of domaining a while and was really just warming back into it when I made those comments.

I still do believe this goes on but at what registrars its hard to say, still I only use moniker (or fab on single names) to check now as i've never had a problem in the many thousands of names i've run through there. I think what it boils down to is, when I spend many hours researching a name I simply can't risk throwing it away.

If you wait 4 days and they don't get any traffic on the name they may drop it still, if indeed they were squatting.

Additionally I should say some people have reported success when emailing the companies in question, threatening some form of further action.

 

[allendesign]

I have had some similar issues lately with other regs. It says the the status is "unknown" and then I check the whois. Not reg'd. I then go to another reg and it's gone. very strange. I picked up this link here at np somewhere http://instantdomainsearch.com/ - a very cool tool I thought. Every good domain I found with it was reg'd when I got to check out.

Who knows... the good names go fast - anything is possible. I hope that a reg can't pick up good names we find available. That would drastically change rules of the game.

 

[kwan]

I don't think it is a coincidence but I don't think anyone is spying either. If you wanted the name, it's because it might be worth something so it's just a matter of time before someone registers it.

You say there is no logical reason for anyone to register this name, but it's been registered since 2003 and has 25 records at archive.org. Just because a name is available when you first look, don't assume it will be there forever. There are thousands of names registered every day.

 

[Dave_Z]

No logical reason to believe why anyone would be in a race to have this domain registered.

There's no logical reason to believe an available domain name will remain that
way for a long time, either.

It's been talked here a few times. Suffice it to say that there's no conclusive
answer, although that won't stop people from believing what they want.

 

[texasgamer]

Its happened to me quite a few times at Godaddy...

 

[sirengirl]

I wouldn't put it past GD to have a company pay them $$$$ to obtain this data. :tri:

 

[scoops22]

I posted a thread on this a little while back and had alot of great input on it from other members.I came to the conclusion that once you search a name on GD it then goes into there system and then when other people search similar terms your unregistered search will come up on the available list at the bottom for others to see.If it goes all the way through your cart and you drop it back out a "taster" may pick it up right after,in this case the domain may become available again after 5 days.I learned my lesson and I wont ever search for domains there again unless I am prepared to register it at that exact moment.Hope this helps.You are not alone.Take care my friend.

 

[smartpc]

The cart bit sounds familar I always clear the cart if i am undecided....but the most feasible explanation is there "smartsearch feature", you typed in hornydoll and then did not purchase, along comes joe bloggs types in horny or doll and hits smart search up pops hornydoll.com in the list....bye bye domain....."procrastination is the enemy of time".....a quote from my 85 yr old grandads mouth.....

 

[mmurch03]

Isn't there some sort of law against that?

 

[allnicksgone]

Isn't there some sort of law against that?

It is like going to a store and seeing something on the shelves that interest you.
It is the only one on the shelf. You pick it up, look at it, think about putting it in your shopping cart, but put it back on the shelf instead. You then leave that area, get half way across the store, then say "what the heck, I'll buy it." You go back to get it, but it is now gone, taken by another shopper. Maybe that shopper saw you looking at it, maybe they came across it on their own.

Frustrating? Yes.
Illegal? No.

 

[eggman]

Just as Amazon show me the similar items other users have bought, it seems it would make sense for GoDaddy to show you names other people have searched for when you're testing out similar themes. I guess it would increase the chances of you purchasing a name. I don't know whether they do, of course, but to me it would make sense.

 

[markmiddleton]

It is like going to a store and seeing something on the shelves that interest you.
It is the only one on the shelf. You pick it up, look at it, think about putting it in your shopping cart, but put it back on the shelf instead. You then leave that area, get half way across the store, then say "what the heck, I'll buy it." You go back to get it, but it is now gone, taken by another shopper. Maybe that shopper saw you looking at it, maybe they came across it on their own.

Frustrating? Yes.
Illegal? No.

Bad Business?

Well its meant i've not been able to register 400 domains at godaddy they otherwise would of got. Not a huge amount but check back in a few months when I go over 1k, then 2 etc.

There should be some sort of secure search for resellers. (At the time I would of been happy to pay extra for this)

 

[Ronald Regging]

I could have sworn it being mentioned that GD definitely sells this information to third parties. It's rather shady, but they are perfectly within their right to sell their own collected data. And it makes sense financially, because they're gaining an extra revenue stream and making money even when people don't register the domains they search for. There are tons of companies that sell data in much the same fashion.

 

[Amnezia]

spying on whois queries is nothing new

Many people on godaddy have reported losing their domains to domibot

read here

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=499456

 

[RogueWriter]

JMO, in all likelyhood, a taster has picked up the domain after seeing your inquiry blip across their screen. Where, exactly, they are getting that information is a matter of opinion.

I've had this happen before, and five or six days after they picked it up, I managed to acquire the domains.

JMO also, but it seems like there would be a lot of room for abuse within the various registrars. Individual employees could be selling the data off or building their own portfolio via a friend, the companies themselves might collate the data and present it to clients, or it could simply be some technology completely unrelated to the registrar itself tracking whois activity somehow.

 

[WORDSWORTH]

I also have posted a thread about this in the past. This happened once too often to me, so I conducted a little experiment.

I typed in a domain name. It showed as available at GoDaddy. I did not register it, or even add it to my cart. Less than 24 hours later, the domain was taken. The whois showed Name King/Maltuzi Holdings.

I waited 5 days, and sure enough, the name had dropped. I repeated the process, with exactly the same results.

What is even more astonishing, is that I repeated the process for 6 drops. Each time I re-entered the name, Maltuzi picked it up a short time later and dropped it within 5 days.

If you use GoDaddy and want a name, make sure you are ready to buy it straightaway before entering it. If the name you wanted has already been picked up, definitely do not type the URL into your browser or click on any ads.

I have tried this with a variety of names. It seems they are mainly interested in acquiring names which have been registered at some point in the past to taste them for traffic.

Matt.

 

[smartpc]

There`s nothing illegal going on, if you dont buy it, it`s not yours you have no rights to it..... heck I picked up bigonair.com from the smart search last week dont know what I will use it for but it sounds good lol...somebodies probably wondering where its gone right now.lol. yes they probably do sell on the information or its just the lists from there full cart no sale list......delete the cart information if not buying....I did notice when i had a reseller account that you were safer searching off the reseller account than the main godaddy site.....just an observation....

 

[Devil_Dog]

I also have posted a thread about this in the past. This happened once too often to me, so I conducted a little experiment.

I typed in a domain name. It showed as available at GoDaddy. I did not register it, or even add it to my cart. Less than 24 hours later, the domain was taken. The whois showed Name King/Maltuzi Holdings.

I waited 5 days, and sure enough, the name had dropped. I repeated the process, with exactly the same results.

What is even more astonishing, is that I repeated the process for 6 drops. Each time I re-entered the name, Maltuzi picked it up a short time later and dropped it within 5 days.

If you use GoDaddy and want a name, make sure you are ready to buy it straightaway before entering it. If the name you wanted has already been picked up, definitely do not type the URL into your browser or click on any ads.

I have tried this with a variety of names. It seems they are mainly interested in acquiring names which have been registered at some point in the past to taste them for traffic.

Matt.

If you don't want it bad enough, go to the domain(don't click the sponsored links of course) and maltuzi/wan-fu and all the other data scroungers'll be out a few dollars with a worthless domain that doesn't get any traffic. :tri:

 

[bluesman]

Over the months, myself and others have posted on this forum dozens upon dozens of clear cut cases where the Domibots of Kenyatech, Enom and a couple of others have x-rayed our domain name searches and grabbed the names we worked long and hard to research and intended to register.

Registrars like Godaddy frankly don't care, since at least "someone" -they're not picky who - registered the domain. There oughtta be a law against it, though. Or at least a privacy-guaranteeing "secure search" feature.

Now let's look at some of the apathetic answers to this huge and continuing problem, vs. the real facts:

Apathetic answer: Aw, thousands of other guys look for names every day, so it's just a coincidence.

Fact: A coincidence that they grabbed pepperonmyleftelbow.com??? NOT!

Apathetic answer: Hey, it's just like a product you put back on the shelf, and a customer next to you gets.

Fact: But these guys aren't next to us - they're not on my registrar's site doing their own searches - they could be on the other side of the world, and they're just SPYING on us and picking our brains!

Apathetic answer: Hey, don't sweat it - they're just tasters who always drop the name back after 4 or 5 days.

Fact: No they don't. Such drops of names grabbed from us after we've painstakingly thought them up, researched them and checked their availability are very rare. The massive "kiting" scams of popular generic names, which involve drops in 5 or less days, usually don't involve us.

Apathetic answer: Hey, it's all your fault for not regging right away the names that got grabbed.

Fact: Many domainers search for hundreds of domains per week - some even do that much per day. Then they filter out the weakest ones and make their final buys soon after. But instead the apathy boys expect that ALL those hundreds of doms should be regged at the outset? Ridiculous!

Apathetic answer: Quit acting like such a paranoid - there's no conspiracy of companies grabbing those names - it's just that many hundreds of other private individuals, like yourself, randomly find names on the net one way or another, that's all.

Fact: 95% of all complaints of domain name-grabbing involve less a half dozen of the exact same domain-dealing companies, including only the likes of Kenyatech, Enom and their affiliates. None of those are merely private individuals, having no connection with setting up traffic-driving page scams and/or flipping domains as a business.

* * *

The above scenarios have already been explained many times, in one way or another. But yet the denial of this ripoff, even by our own fellow domainers in many cases, still continues. And if we can't even get all of our OWN people on our side to recognize this nightmare, then it'll never go away and can only get much worse.