Originally Posted by westerdal

Hello everyone, I am Jay, the CEO of Whois.sc, we power searches at Network Solutions and GoDaddy. I can safely say, only two people have access to the search queries that generate suggestions. My CTO and I are the only ones with access. We testify in court and to law enforcement authorities all the time. I can safely guarantee no one else has access to the queries or those coming through people using our XML services.

Let me remind everyone that there are 47M active .COM domains and every year now another 10M 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.

ok, with all that in prospective, keep in mind at 102M 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. I 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. In most cases if someone like Manila registers a domain, just wait 5 days and register it after they delete it.

There is no possible way what you type in whois.sc gets out to anyone. I know a lot about this industry and the people in it. No company that I know of does this practice. Not Godaddy, not anyone. 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. If you give me a few domains, I will look up the history of them and see if I can get the dates they were registered in the past. We have a huge database of when and where a domains were registered previously. Once someone registers it then it becomes public, then deleted, any of those 102M domains can be registered.

Jay
Whois.sc

Originally Posted by Brujah

Pornwolf, I hear ya.. but in Jays case ( Whois.sc ) I think they would stand to lose a great deal more if they were doing something a bit unethical. With deals with major registrars, and profiting from the services they offer, I think their reputation stands to be harmed greatly. I don't think he would risk it. I believe what he said, the way he explained it, and that he believes it to be true. Trusting the registry (Verisign/Netsol) however, I wouldn't go that far.

Originally Posted by Brujah

Trusting the registry (Verisign/Netsol) however, I wouldn't go that far.

Originally Posted by Expo_Vids

Ok, Jay but I have had SEVERAL very specific domain searches registered by Manila recently. At first I just noticed that one domain I decided I wanted had been registered by them a day or 2 after I had searched for it. Then I got curious and typed in several other of the domains I had tried (and were available at that time) and they had also been registed within a day or 2 of me searching for them and had been snapped up by the exact same company.

None of these domains were even remotely related to each other so you can't say that they were just registering additional spellings or variations.

I see other simlilar discussions on the net about Manila Industries. Perhaps they are getting the search data at a higher level then your company? I guess they could be tapped into whatever database your company queries from.

Originally Posted by chadglni

How the hell do you "taste" a domain for 4 days without buying it? :1orglaugh