Domain Tasting VS Spying

There is a known problem of people registering domains that you want to register. The searcher thinks someone is spying on them and registering their selection before them. Let me remind everyone that there are 47M active .COM domains as of March 2006 and every year another 10M domains .COM domains get registered on top of that. Keep in mind that the average daily vocabulary spoken in a day is 3000 words. Most people only know about 65,000 words total.

With all that in prospective, here is an amazing fact; 102,000,000 (120M) DOT COM domains have at one point been registered and are currently deleted. There are twice as many domains deleted right now then active. The likely hood that you came up with something unique is not that high. We need to be frank here, other people in the world of 6 billion people may produce the name you thought of before you did. A common technique to is cycling through those 102M domains that have been registered and hold 1 million of those domains active for 4 days, see what happens, then return them do the dead. Versign allows companies to wait up to 5 days before deleting a domain name and the company pays nothing for that.

As a Registrar, they have 5 days to delete a domain name and not get charged. This is to allow a registrar to handle a chargeback or a typo if it is caught early. It also allows a registrar to test their registration services and then delete the domains. In the last year, this ability/right has been abused and now it is mostly used for Domain Tasting. The orginal reason is still valid and writted into a contract so Verisign has not modified the 5 day grace.

No company that we are aware of spies on their own customers. I know it is easy to come to a conclusion based on the evidence you have, but it is staggering to think about how many domains are in a dead state right now and people are cycling through them. This is called Domain Tasting. (New term in the last year, but starting to get more common now). There are currently about 2 million domains a day now getting tasted. Once someone registers it then it becomes public, then deleted, any of those 102M domains can be registered.