I have just been using domainsbot.com to help brainstorm a domain name. Then, I found an excellent one by typing it directly into the search box (my invention, not a suggestion from their list). It was available. Thirty minutes later, it was registered to some company in the USA. I am not sure how the domain name information became available for it to be snapped up so soon after I typed it in. Any suggestions?

I cannot believe this. The whole thing stinks.

Jon

there seems to be alot of this happening lately companies are spying on whois searches and registering names of intrest in the hope of selling them for thousands later

The whole practice sucks.

Yeah I have heard of this happening quite a bit. Thats why you need to register the moment you find a gem domain.

I'm going to stick out my neck on this one for now.

I happen to know of the owners of domainsbot. AFAIK they don't sell searches, so
it's possible someone might have been "taking a peek" through their servers.

If you're willing to PM me the name, I can check with him about it. There's a chance
they don't know until someone brings it to their attention.

But if not, then I don't blame you. I'm just exploring options here after all.

Hi guys,

I'm Emiliano Pasqualetti, COO at DomainsBot.

I'm very happy for this chance to interact with our users.

Privacy is definitely one of our biggest concerns.
Our company provides domain suggestions to the most important registrars in the world like GoDaddy, Tucows and Register.
Can you imagine what if we sell this kind of information to anybody? We would be out of the market in no time!

Ok, this was the corporate information I had to share.

Now let's talk about what happened to Jon12345.
We believe Jon's problem came up because he was using our "Instant Check" on our main page.
I love that tool, it is extremely useful when you need to find available or for sale domains and you know what you need.

Unfortunately such a responsive tool cannot be completely accurate.
The status database is updated every 24 hours and there is no way for us to track some types of domain names (like no DNS ones) without querying the whois (there is no way to be as fast as we need querying the whois).

IMO the problem was Jon was looking for a non available domains that we suggested as available. So when he completed the domain registration process with us or on his preferred registrar he found the domain name was actually registered.

As you can see no illegal activities are involved in the process.
It is just an accuracy problem.

I hope this was helpful for you guys.

Jon, it would be great if you could send us the domain name you had the problem with and the date of the problem.
We would be more than happy to investigate for you.
If you have additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at emiliano AT domainsbot.com.

Thank you guys!

Emiliano Pasqualetti
COO
DomainsBot

iomicio, thank you for replying.
If the OP would share the name then we would know if the domain was already registered or registered after the search.
I see that Godaddy uses domainsbot for name suggestion searches. Does domainsbot uses any third party services that have access to seaches from the domainsbot site?

I really like the software,

Hi Techno,

You definitely got the point. I hope we could share the exact domain name to clear the problem.
I want to give you all the assistance from our side to clear this point.
We know that trust is our biggest asset.

Let me share with you this example:
Go to our home page (domainsbot.com) and type "IANA".
You can see iana.info and iana.us available.
If you click on the "buy now" link you will be redirected to your favourite registrar.
You can now see the domain has been actually registered in the 2001.

With our Ajax look up tool we had to face a trade off between the accuracy and the "live experience".
We decided to offer you the second one.
Thanks to this thread I' seeing the importance of providing a clear communication about this topic, so thank you very much guys.

Talking about 3rd parties services the answer is no.
We don't use any 3rd parties services to deliver our suggestions.
We designed every single component of our services. Both for privacy reasons and especially to have the total control of our products.

Again if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at emiliano AT domainsbot.com.

PS: thank you franksredhot for the testimonial!

Best regards,

Emiliano

no problem, emiliano