Google went out for shopping and bought thousands of domain names

Apr 23, 2008 14:42 GMT  ·  By

Google tries anything it's possible to protect its brand and if this means buying thousands of domain, no problem, Google does this, too. In fact, it has already done it as thousands of domain names, some of them totally unrelated to the Mountain View-based company, were bought by Google, probably just as a security measure meant to prevent people's cruel intentions. The folks at Pingdom created a huge list of domain names, most of them belonging to Google, which were apparently bought by the search giant sometimes in the past.

If domain names such as gewgol.com, glougle.com, goolgel.com, glugli.com, georgle.com or gmale.com are obviously intended to prevent typos and misspellings, other ones have absolutely no connection with Google. Take for example mariolovespasta.com. Do you think the Mountain View company really cares that Mario loves pasta? Well, I don't think so, but what about goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com? Is this another domain bought for prevention purposes? Or maybe you like googlewarez.com...

Moreover, there are a few not safe for work domain names which I'm not going to disclose for the simple reason that they're obviously meant to avoid websites which could make fun of Google's services, no matter if we're talking about Gmail or Google Checkout.

"We found all of these domain names by processing the root zone file for the .com top-level domain. We also confirmed that the domain names in this post are owned by Google by looking at domain WHOIS information for the ones we included. It is likely that many of these domain names have been registered by Google either to protect their brand, and in some cases to prevent typosquatting and similar practices. Google lawyers have surely been keeping busy reclaiming lots of Google-related domain names over the years," Pingdom wrote in a blog entry.