Google Inc. announced yesterday that it would begin to take increasing measures against domain name tasting, a practice which exploits a grace period originally designed to rectify legitimate mistakes, such as registrants mistyping the domain name they are about to buy. With automation and a burgeoning online advertising market, entrepreneurs have generated big bucks by exploiting this policy to test hoards of names, keeping just the ones that turn out to generate the most revenue; unfortunately for legitimate users, these entrepreneurs can tie up millions of domain names at any given moment.
Over the next few weeks, Google will start looking for names that are repeatedly registered and dropped within a five-day grace period for full refunds and will block those domains from generating revenue via AdSense. Yahoo, one of Google"s chief rivals, has already taken similar measures into account.
"We believe that this policy will have a positive impact for users and domain purchasers across the Web," Google spokesman Brandon McCormick said.