ebay typo glitch?

[Mendis]

The other day, an friend who knows I’m interested in domains told me he’d seen some rather startling domains available. I checked it out myself later on a different domain search (ukreg.co.uk) & they did seem available. They were all typo’s of eBay, I even checked their O.V, which they all had. Ebbay.com & .co.uk for example was one of them.

I thought someone probably dropped them as they were such obvious typos I really couldn’t believe they weren’t taken.

I was going to post them on acorn domains for others to discuss (and reg I guess if anyone is into that kind of stuff) but they were taken too quickly.

The thing is, the who-is on the domains now says they’ve all been registered for years.

Question is - Am I going mad? And my friend? Or do the domain searches sometimes have hiccups like this.

 

[retired_member9]

I've experienced similar whois glitch recently where domain mistakenly showed as available.

 

[aqls]

THE only reliable place to look up .uk domains is from the www.nominet.org.uk site
or http://195.66.240.211/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=INSERTDOMAIN.co.uk&x=0&y=0

All other registrars have to query nominet's database in order to determine availability, so the potential error queue lengthens to:
Nominet database error
Nominet whois error
Connection between registrar and nominet error
Registrar software error

I have had vi.net (aka active24) resell a domain that I own to someone else. They even changed the nameserver details to the new "owner".

So even the (crap) registrars fall for this potential hiccup in their own software.

Even if you think you have registered the domain and the registrar takes your money, that is *still* no guarantee that you have secured the domain.

Only when the nominet whois shows you as the owner can you reliably depend on it.

-aqls-