I’ve been waiting to hear this kind of news for years: Domains May Disappear After Search. I’ve often told people for this kind of reason to watch where they are registering domains, as I believe some registrars like register.com are not very scrupulous and would do this exact kind of thing. I personally use GKG for all my domain registration needs, though they have recently ticked me off with a policy I recently ran into in which you can’t modify any information on a domain 6 months after renewing an expired domain with a credit card. Their tech support also isn’t very good, but they have fair prices and excellent domain management interfaces.

Another huge domain problem is “domain tasting” in which domains can be registered and then refunded within a five day grace period. Unethical people will use this to register expired domains and keep them if they get enough hits. After all, domains only really cost 25 cents to register if you are an accredited ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) registrar, which cost something like $3000 to obtain. This is a big problem if anyone lets their domain expire. Fortunately, some services, like GKG, give you a grace period to reregister your domain after it expires before others can try to claim it.