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Official: Google's brazen domination of Earth nearly complete

TLDs, gotta catch 'em all

The word “google” is the top domain name on the internet, in terms of registrations, according to new research.

A study by domain data provider DomainTools has found that the ad giant's name is registered in 231 of the world's 300-odd top-level domains (TLDs) - from google.biz and google.com to google.tk.

It beat its closest rival, “nic”, by 32 TLDs, according to the survey, which looked at Whois records, domain name system zone files and DNS queries.

That's somewhat surprising as “nic”, for Network Information Centre, is often considered the default left-of-the-dot domain when you want to find out more about the owner of a TLD.

Indeed, every one of the almost 2,000 hopefuls applying for new TLD with ICANN currently will be contractually obliged to register nic.tld to themselves.

The DomainTools survey also found that hotel-related terms are wildly populous. The string “booking” is registered in 193 TLDs, while “hotels” and “hotel” have 193 and 188 respectively.

Other brands showing up in the top 20 strings included Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and Nokia.

The same survey also found that 75 per cent of names registered in .com are not registered in any other TLD. ®

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