I have seen reports of $12


someone now has to ask....... will G-domains rank higher in serps?

:)

New domain endings like .guru and .photography can help you find a meaningful address that stands out on the web.

Welcome to the new gold rush.

New domain endings like .guru and .photography can help you find a meaningful address that stands out on the web.

Or just have people thinking your site is a source of malware because it isn't a "proper" .com

Seriously I came across a thread on a music forum from somebody complaining that a link must be suspect because it went to a .us site. I was practically called a liar when I posted that it was the valid cctld for the USA.

Its going to take a while for these you tlds to be accepted by the public.

[edited by: piatkow at 4:28 pm (utc) on Jun 24, 2014]

The question you have to ask yourself is this just a ploy for Google to pierce the domain privacy shield and find out whom owns what?

I wouldn't trust them as far as I could NOFOLLOW link them with domain names.

Esp. considering Google's history on crap support with their other products (none) which leaves people mostly twisting in the breeze with no recourse when anything goes wrong.

No thanks.

I'll still buy Glass or a self-driving Google car, but THIS is something they shouldn't be trusted with.

I learned a long time ago that because they handle the ranking of my site in serps and because I deal with Google financially(adsense/adwords) it's best not to be any more involved with Google than that.

Otherwise... how is this better than an already existing free hosting service? I can't see much without logging on and I don't want to do that.

This is an optional service offered by Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly and Wix. For an additional cost, you’ll enjoy secure, reliable hosting, customizable web templates and powerful features like e-commerce, drag & drop creation and mobile site-management. No coding required!

The website builder section seems to be outsourced.

Esp. considering Google's history on crap support with their other products (none) which leaves people mostly twisting in the breeze with no recourse when anything goes wrong.

Couldn't agree more. With their history of a complete lack of support, I would be too scared something would go wrong and as usual, there would be no human to communicate with. Just a help process that takes you in endless loops.

...considering Google's history on crap support with their other products (none) which leaves people mostly twisting in the breeze with no recourse when anything goes wrong...

This! And, I am very selective on what Google products I use due to privacy concerns. This is definitely not on my list to check out, not even if domains were free.

All I can say is so what. Google has had access to domain register info for a long time this is nothing new, (private or not) all they want to do is be a part of this pie as well. Your not forced to register a domain with them so why all the backlash.

Google is a conglomerate - they want to be in everything.

There is no way they are not going to do this 1,000,000 times better than every other registrar out there. The domain registration business is stuck in about 1998.

send me an invite please ;-)

Yes, they want to be in everything. They were funded by secret organizations so it's clear they want to see all and hear all.

Your not forced to register a domain with them so why all the backlash.

It's called sounding the alarm so the novices out there that read this fine forum can think twice before succumbing to Google's siren song.

Who knows, if it was cheap or free and I had some silly personal projects maybe, but I wouldn't use it for anything I wanted to keep pr anything I wanted Google to keep their nose out of, or customer work.

That's my greatest fear is the naive clients out there that suckle from the teat of Google tech and thing they're the bomb.

Sigh.

As one who bought their google phone... yeah right.

For me, the most important question would be "Will they stick it out?" What if I built a 2,000-page site around a mytopic.guru domain and Google's domain-management service went the way of Knol two years from now?

Google has had access to domain register info for a long time this is nothing new

That was my first reaction, how is this announcement different, am I missing something?

"Private registration" is being offered free by Google. So there shouldn't be any privacy concerns anyway. :)

I finally got my invite and decided to give it a whirl. Especially since my existing registrar's customer service continues to go downhill (not that I except Google's to be any better...), but most especially since their (existing registrar) discounts for renewals have become much more difficult to get, so Google's price of $12/year (and no additional ICAAN fees tacked on?) makes it 20% cheaper. (Current registrar used to give about 20% discount for renewing 6+ domains, but now the minimum is 20 domains. So, bye-bye!) Oh, and that free private registration was an incentive. Of course, Google may raise their prices in the future- we'll see.

It looks like you need to have a Google Wallet account setup to use it- some people may balk at that.

The biggest complaint so far is that you can only transfer one domain at a time. So you have to go through all the steps and complete the checkout process in full for each domain transferred. Not a biggee for me- I've got about 30 domains with staggered expiration dates. But for people with hundreds of domains (or more), this might be a deal breaker. The last time I transferred domains, I *thought* I was able to do a bulk transfer and do them all at once with 1 checkout. But it's still beta, so hopefully they will add that functionality soon.

I would imagine the big incentive for people to register domains with Google is the perception that their domains will be anointed and rank better.

I personally would not give Google a dime and anymore of my personal information than they already have amassed on me. There are far more affordable registrars out there anyway. Name Silo comes to mind, which is less than $9 per .com/yr with free domain privacy.

It is not often you need to communicate with your registrar (hopefully anyway) but when you do, you neeeeeed a real person, not a FAQ page. Google doesn't do customer service in anything they make available, why would I think this is different/better?

For me, the most important question would be "Will they stick it out?" What if I built a 2,000-page site around a mytopic.guru domain and Google's domain-management service went the way of Knol two years from now?

That's why people smarter than Googlers have put contingency plans in place for such events. In the case of a registrar failing, the domains will be transferred to other registrars. But if you are building a 2,000 page site around a .guru domain, you may find that you will have other problems.

Regards...jmcc

I would imagine the big incentive for people to register domains with Google is the perception that their domains will be anointed and rank better.

Google is already a significant player with over 1.4M sites hosted on its IP ranges. It wants to get into the domain name business because its FUD buddies and algorithm twiddlers have convinced people that it is bad to link to other sites. Now for a search engine that depends on link discovery, this is a pretty serious problem and Google can't find new sites efficiently outside the gTLDs.

Being dotCOMunists, they have no concept of the domain name business outside of .COM and don't seem to realise how it works in country level markets. Most ccTLDs are denied areas for Google because many ccTLD registries do not grant zone file access in the manner of gTLD registries. This means that Google has to rely on other approaches to find new ccTLD websites. And because the idiots have been going around scaring people about linking to other sites, Google cannot efficiently find all new ccTLD websites.

There is also the problem of turning webmasters against Google with this little venture. Many webmasters are small scale web developers and Google's attempts to offer the customers of these webdevs DIY website building tools is really going to endear it to the web devs. The webhosters will start to consider Google to be an enemy and will work together against it as it will be seen as an external threat to the local market.

Regards...jmcc

There is also the problem of turning webmasters against Google with this little venture

You mean there are webmasters out there who haven't already turned?

There is no way on this earth I would buy domains from Google. Give them my name, address, telephone number, mobile number, bank details, website, 'secret question' answers? I'm a bit naïve sometimes but not that much.

Might be naive to think that Google doesn't already have most of that information...