Google domain name registrar
Major search engine Google was recently accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and is now a registrar. The company clearly stated that selling domain names is not part of its roadmap and it won’t be anytime soon. The first question would be then, why would the ICANN give them the opportunity to become a registrar if Goggle won’t be using the privilege? But it would be even more interesting to try to understand why Google invested time and efforts to be accredited.
Becoming a registrar also mean having access to tons of information about domain name owners, companies, localizations and more. Google is constantly chasing away search engine spam and artificial link popularity inflation and it would not be a surprise if they include this information as a new factor in their algorithm. For example, websites that intensively cross-link and are registered under the same ownership could be penalized, as could short term registration domains too. Now Google which is well know to already “sandbox” or impose some kind of penalties for new domains, could easily give more value to long term registration domain names. Well, this is of course unfair to those who want to save a few dollars or simply prefer to extend their registration each year, but also it really sounds like the type of quality factor the search engine would include in its algorithm.
The Whois database is frequently queried for detailed information about domain registration but the ability to easily get such information through the Google interface would be a nice feature to implement too.
It is also possible, that in these times of big acquisitions the billion dollar internet search company would also use its new privileges to expand towards web hosting. Google claims they are not interested in such matters but let’s put it this way – with now two gigabytes of email storage why not offer a free hosting and domain names to users? Interestingly, the search engine already offers free storage for the web log community via blogger.
I personally do not believe in Google’s only trying to understand the domain registration world better. This firm is a business, and not only that – they are the fastest growing internet technology firm in North America and if they want to know more about anything they have to resources to do so but to do a move without a real overall goal is doubtful. It is more likely that Google is planning to use the information gathered through its registrar privileges to implement new quality features in its search algorithm.
