Domain name registered on GoDaddy after I looked it up?
This is a well known scumbag practice Godaddy has been doing for a long time.
They buy domains they like that are searched then try to sell them at a high price.
Do a quick search for "godaddy buying searched domains" and you'll see articles from 2011 and on about this happening.
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Last week I looked up a TLD to see if what I wanted was available, and was actually a bit surprised when what I wanted was not already taken. Fast forward a week and I actually go to purchase the domain through a hosting service, and the domain isn't available. I do a little WHOIS research and find out the domain is now registered on GoDaddy with an expiration date of "2015-08-21 15:35:20". This almost exactly 24 hours after I looked up the domain name.
This seems a bit fishy to me. Does GoDaddy have some mechanism of registering domain names automatically after someone searches / expresses interest? I was presented with the option to have GoDaddy contact the owner and offer to buy the domain name.
Disclaimer: I was not planning to actually use GoDaddy services. I only wanted to know if the domain was available.
Edit: It looks like some content has gone up on the domain that I was searching for, so it looks like someone else legitimately registered the domain. I'll be much quicker on the purchase next time. Thanks for the information you all provided.
This is a well known scumbag practice Godaddy has been doing for a long time.
They buy domains they like that are searched then try to sell them at a high price.
Do a quick search for "godaddy buying searched domains" and you'll see articles from 2011 and on about this happening.
Use whois to lookup domains.
Whois for Windows:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897435.aspx
For cases where whois doesn't work, check the Wikipedia article for that TLD to find the official website of the registry (or NIC).
E.g. for .de domains, you'd go to denic.de.