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Google would love to sell you a (very expensive) .day domain for the special days in your life
But keep in mind they're a few grand each right now
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There are many top-level domains you can get these days if you want something that's a little different from the boring .com, or the average .net. Google has been highlighting its use of these novelty TLDs, selling them to customers through its Google Registry and even using them itself. Now Google is slinging a new one: .day. Just get ready to pay the price.
Some guy managed to buy Google Search's domain name in Argentina
The issue was quickly sorted out, but not before a lot of people noticed
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Google Search is one of the biggest, most recognizable brands on the planet. So when it's suddenly inaccessible for a country of 45 million people, someone's bound to notice. Such was the case on Wednesday, after an Argentinian man was somehow able to purchase the domain for the Argentina portal to Google Search, google.com.ar.
Someone at Google forgot to renew a blogspot domain, still offline a week later
Thousands of blogs are affected
A week ago, thousands of small blogs went offline in India. It appears that Google lost control over its blogspot.in domain, which is where many small blogs are available at. While you would think that a multi-billion dollar company like Google could fix a glaring issue like this within a short amount of time, blogspot.in remains unreachable to this day.
Google has introduced a few top-level domains over the years, including .google, .apps, and even .lol. Last year, the company announced the .dev TLD, intended for use by software developers. Registration has been open to select partners since January 16th, but now anyone can buy a .dev domain — as long as you have $11k.
As the number of available .com domains continues to decline, alternative domain endings are becoming more popular. Many developers (including yours truly) prefer to use .io domains for personal sites and projects, as a nod to "I/O" being the abbreviation for "input/output," but now Google is working on a new ending specifically for those people — .dev.
Earlier this year, Google made it possible to purchase domains ending in .app, and now you can grab another flavor of exotic domain. Today, .page domains are available in early access. Anybody can buy one, but they'll be cheaper once they enter general availability on October 9.
Three years ago, Google paid $25 million for exclusive rights to the '.app' top-level web domain. At long last, the company is now opening up registrations for .app, with the Early Access Program in full swing. The general public will have to wait until May 8, but various companies have already bought over 3,000 .app domains.
Most reputable sites on the internet are registered under the .com top-level domain. For what amounts to essentially meaningless historic reasons, people will generally agree that a domain that ends in .com feels more official than one ending in, say, .net or .biz. Of course, as more and more people and businesses come online, it becomes harder and harder to grab a relevant domain name — let alone one that ends in .com — and so you're often forced to settle for second best.
Quite a lot can change in 20 years. In 1997, the iPod was still a few years away, Bill Clinton started his second term as US President, and a domain for a search index called 'Google!' was registered. In fact, today marks the 20 year anniversary of Google.com's domain registration.
If you follow patent litigation news, the name "Lodsys" has the same kind of weight as, say, Kim Jong Un or Robert Ford: when you see it, you just know something crazy is going on. But it looks like the legendary patent troll has fallen on hard times, as its website domain has been allowed to expire. The domain is currently being held by Register.com, which has not re-listed it for sale. Perhaps the one-man company and overly eager patent holder and his lawyers have run out of lawsuits - we can only hope.
This likely won't affect too many average users, but if you happen to work in a business or university with an open wireless network that relies on an internal hostname within a domain for any redirection, you're in a bit of luck. Up until this point, there's been a bug in Android that makes it impossible for the system to resolve a hostname on a local domain to its proper IP address.
Earlier on Wednesday, there was a bit of a scare when CyanogenMod wrote a blog post instructing users to transition to cyanogenmod.org instead of the .com address the group has used up until now. As the story goes, a member of the team donated the domain back in the early days and had managed it ever since. Until recently when control of the domain was in question during a dispute with said user. According to the original post, this person was asking for a substantial fee for the address, as well as access to Google Apps accounts that managed a number of public-facing email accounts.
Cybersquatting, one of the more profitable forms of trolling, is nothing new to anyone familiar with the interwebs. In fact, it's often a source of some pretty funny disputes.