Darren Lambert

I was doing some research and thinking of buying a new domain name, for a van review website.  I did a search on Easily.co.uk  and found vanreport.com to be free.  I then searched in GoDaddy.com, the registrar I usually use.  30 mins or so later I went back to GoDaddy.com, only to find that vanreport.com had been taken!  I checked the whois data and it shoes it was registered today using details such as enomservice.com and WhoisByProxy.com, which are anonymous services. 

So it looks like someone is monitoring domain searches at GoDaddy or Easily and buying those domains.  Or it was a conincidence.  This person doesn't think so though. There's also more of it going on here and here.  Here is an article about avoiding the interception.

Anyway, I had another domain name on my short-list which is probably better.  Careful where you go searching for domain names!

Update: As soon as I posted this message I checked the vanreport.com domain and it is already parked with ads. I hate those sites.

Update2: 8th August 2008 - 1 week after this post I checked the domain and it was released and available for purchase. This backs up the claims in some of the links above that people are scanning domain search terms and buying domains that people are likely to buy. I bought the domain in the end, at the normal first-registration fee.

Cuil.com, a new search engine, has been laucnhed.  These former Google and IBM employees have setup a search engine to rival Google.

Cuil aims to intepret more of the content on the page to provide better quality results.

So far the results are not so great.

Try a few searches about topics that you know about.  See if you think the authority sites rank highly.

I read a few articles where people demonstrate that the results are poor.

http://searchengineland.com/080728-024035.php

Have you heard about Google Knol?

Knol is a rival to Wikipedia.

Google seem to be favouring knol pages in their own search results now.

Try searching for "how to backpack" in Google.  The first entry is a brand new knol page.

I think they have gone mad, and so does Aaron Wall.

Cuil have a good chance to beat Google if they list quality small sites delivering good information, rather than assuming that the big sites like IMDB, Amazon and Wikipedia have it all (and knol know I guess).

If you are using the eBay affiliate toolkit and you are getting thick grey borders, then here is a fix.

If your page looks like this

add the following code to your css file

img {display: block;}


This will fix a problem with the script displaying on XHTML Transitional Strict pages. Your script will now look like this