Google threatens domain names with Direct Connect

Google’s latest social networking play is a potential threat to the relevance of domain names.

The company has announced the launch of Direct Connect, a feature that enables direct navigation to Google+ pages via the search engine.

Essentially, typing a + sign before the name of a brand in the search box will take you directly to that brand’s Google+ page, assuming it has one, bypassing search results.

This video explains it pretty well:

Google said yesterday that at launch a handful of brands, including Pepsi, Toyota and Angry Birds, are signed up, but from where I’m sitting only +google seems to work as advertised.

The feature also only seems to work when used with the search box on Google’s home page.

However, it does not require a massive leap of the imagination to see it quite easily showing up soon in the Google Toolbar and the integrated search/URL bar in Chrome.

Direct Connect was launched alongside Google+ Pages, the company’s answer to Facebook Pages – a way for companies to have their own branded fan page for interacting with customers.

Many companies are already advertising their Facebook addresses, or simply encouraging people to search Facebook for their brand, in print, on TV and elsewhere.

It might not be long before we see +brand advertising along similar lines.

Could Google train people to type +pepsi instead of pepsi.com? It’s an interesting notion.

The + operator was of course until recently a way of telling Google that you really, really wanted to see search results containing your query.

As Google has increasingly crapified its search engine with infuriating “user-friendly” guff over the last few years, I’ve trained myself to automatically put a + in front of every search in order to get the results I want rather than what Google, in its infinite wisdom, thinks I might want.

I’m sure I’m not alone.

While the + function has now been deprecated in favor of enclosing queries in quotation marks, it is nevertheless already trained user behavior in many cases.

I’m not suggesting that Google is going to kill domain names, but at first glance Direct Connect certainly seems to be a step toward attempting to make them less relevant for branding and advertising.

I can’t help but note that Google+ Pages was launched unilaterally by Google with no multi-stakeholder consultation, no battles with intellectual property interests, and no government oversight.

The Association of National Advertisers has yet to demand that Google shuts it down.

Google loses Goggle.com cybersquatting complaint

File this one under: “Good for UDRP, terrible for internet users.”

Google has managed to lose a cybersquatting complaint over the domain name goggle.com, after a National Arbitration Forum panel declined to consider the case.

Goggle.com, like so many other typos of the world’s most-popular sites, is currently being used to get people to sign up to expensive text messaging services via bogus surveys and competitions.

As Domain Name Wire reported when the complaint was filed, up until recently the site was using a confusingly similar style to Google’s familiar look and feel.

It’s got bad faith written all over it.

But “goggle” it is also a genuine English word.

And it turns out that the previous owner of goggle.com, Knowledge Associates, had entered into a “co-existence relationship” with Google that enabled it to operate the domain without fear of litigation.

The current owner was able to present NAF with documentation showing that this right may have been transferred when he bought the domain.

So the three-person NAF panel decided not to consider the complaint, concluding: “this case is foremost a business and/or contractual dispute between two companies that falls outside the scope of the Policy.”

The panel wrote:

Does the Co-existence Agreement apply to the disputed domain names? Does Respondent stand in the shoes of the original registrant? Does the consent of Complainant extend in time to the current actions of Respondent and in person to the Respondent? Has the Respondent complied with the obligations of the original registrant? Does the “no public statements” provision in the Co-existence Agreement prohibit its disclosure or use as a defense by Respondent?

These are factual and legal issues that go far beyond the scope of the Policy.

These are factual and legal issues that must be resolved before any consideration of confusing similarity, legitimate rights and interest, and bad faith under the Policy can be made.

This means that the current registrant gets to keep the domain, and to keep making cash from what in the vast majority of cases are likely to be clumsy typists.

Google now of course can either decide to pay off the registrant, or take him to court.

The registrant, David Csumrik, was represented by Zak Muscovitch.

Google ranks new .xxx site higher than its .com

Is Google experimenting with swapping out .com domains when an equivalent .xxx exists?

Last week, ICM Registry announced it had granted ifriends.xxx to iFriends, a popular network of adults-only webcams, as part of its pre-launch Founders Program.

Today, a Google search for iFriends sometimes returns ifriends.xxx right at the top, with ifriends.com nowhere to be seen on the first page.

Other times, ifriends.com or ifriends.net gets top billing.

The iFriends network has been around since 1998, according to an ICM press release, so its .com and .net domains will presumably already have significant juice.

Obviously, Google has been useless for returning easily predictable results ever since it started “personalizing” SERPs a couple years back.

Running a few non-scientific experiments, it seems that the choice of browser, toolbar, Google site and location may play a factor in which results you see.

The significant thing seems to me to be the fact that when your results do include the .xxx domain first, it appears to completely replace the .com.

What do you see when you search? What do you think is going on?

Google acquires StreetView.com

Google has got its hands on the domain name StreetView.com, four years after first launching its occasionally controversial street-level maps service.

The domain switched to Google’s contact information and name servers this week, according to Whois records.

It was first acquired quite recently from its original owner, who registered it in 2001, by an outfit called Brand Certified Inc, ostensibly based at a strip mall in Nevada.

A bit of digging shows that Brand Certified appears to be a front, a shell company operated by MarkMonitor for the purpose of quietly obtaining domain names for its clients.

There’s no UDRP record for the name – it would have been a far from straightforward case – so I guess it was acquired either by being purchased or through some other means.

The domain does not currently resolve from where I’m sitting.

Yawn… Google buys shortcut g.co for millions

Do I have to write another 19 of these stories?

.CO Internet has announced the sale of the domain name g.co to Google. It will be used – shock! – as a URL shortener for Google’s services.

While the selling price has not been disclosed, I believe the starting bid for single-character .co domains is around $1.5 million. I expect Google will have paid more.

Google said on its official blog that only Google will be able to create g.co short links and they’ll only redirect to Google sites, unlike goo.gl, which is its customer-facing shortening service.

This is excellent news for .CO, of course. It gets yet another super-high-profile anchor tenant that will spread .co links (and, hopefully for the company, awareness) around the web like a virus.

Amazon acquired a.co, z.co and k.co, Overstock is of course now known as O.co, Go Daddy got x.co and Twitter is using t.co as its official URL shortener.

By my reckoning, that leaves another 19 one-letter .co names to sell. The registry’s windfall could quite easily amount to a year’s revenue for just 26 registrations.

That’s not including the numbers, of course.

Speaking of numbers, .CO also announced today that Silicon Valley incubator 500 Startups is to use 500.co, instead of 500startups.com, as its official domain.

Entrepreneurs, not URL shorteners, are .CO’s target market, vital for its longevity, so it was a very smart PR move to combine these two customer wins into one announcement.