I was doing some domain research, and I noticed that Vaccination.com is now registered to a company known as Media Market of Boise, Idaho. As of September 24, 2009, the domain name was registered to Internet REIT, but on October 20, 2009, the domain name changed hands and is now registered to Media Market.

I don’t know anything about Media Market, but I do know they were the company who registered quite a few Bing related typo domain names just before they were acquired by Microsoft. Interestingly enough, Jamie reported that Microsoft recently acquired H1N1Symptoms.com, and the domain name resolves to the Bing results page for the search phrase “h1n1symptoms.” This is great for the owner of h1n1symptoms.us, as that website currently ranks #1 for the search term.

Prior to Microsoft’s acquisition of H1N1Symptoms.com, it was registered to TenPenny Group, a company that among other things, acquires domain names on behalf of Microsoft and other large companies.

I missed the article in TechCrunch on Tuesday until just now, but AOL’s Sphere, the self-dubbed “next phase in the evolution of AOL News,” is undergoing a rebranding effort. The new name of the brand will be Surphace, and the company will use Surphace.com as its domain name.

Of course, when people tell their buddies to check out “Surphace.com,” many of their friends will inevitably head to Surface.com instead, which happens to be a domain name owned by Microsoft, which redirects to the Microsoft website.

With AOL currently embroiled in a lawsuit against Advertise.com for trademark infringement, one can amusingly ask if AOL will believe that they deserve the Surface.com domain name to go along with their renamed brand. It surely would be a head scratcher, but I wouldn’t exactly be shocked. I wonder what Microsoft thinks of this.

On another note, I still don’t understand why some companies – especially large companies – still create brand names that are difficult to spell. This can only lead to brand confusion, lost traffic, and potentially even litigation. One would think they could find another brand name and buy the .com if they think it’s worthwhile.

In a shrewd move that many (probably most) companies don’t consider before launching a new product or service, Microsoft went ahead and purchased many Bing related typo domain names prior to launch. Some of the domain names now owned by Microsoft include, Bimg.com, Bibg.com, Bihg.com, and Binf.com.

All of these typo domain names were previously owned by other people and companies before Microsoft acquired them. One common link between these names is that it appears they were acquired by a company known as Media Market of Boise, Idaho between being owned by the former owner and Microsoft. You can see the Whois lookup for Bibg.com from February as an example.

One interesting domain acquisition they made was Bing.com. The reason it’s particularly interesting to me is that it was previously owned by General Mills, another Fortune 500 company.

Unfortunately, there were many Bing typos that Microsoft didn’t and/or couldn’t acquire. Among them include Bong.com, Bingo.com, Bin.com, Big.com, and Ing.com. I don’t know if the traffic increase can be linked directly with the Bing launch, but just look at the Compete scores for  Bong.com, Bung.com and Bin.com after May.

You can learn quite a bit of information from public companies who must disclose just about every thing that could have an implication on the value of the company. Because of this, it’s a smart idea to follow the filings of various domain companies so you can read up on company filings, rather than rely on blogs and other news outlets who may or may not report on certain events/filings.

Some publicly traded companies that are required to make public filings that are related to the domain industry include the following (please let me know if I missed any company):

Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Marchex
Top Level Domain Holdings
Tucows
Dark Blue Sea
Verisign
Banks.com

In order to follow these companies, I set up a stock portfolio in Yahoo specifically with domain industry related stocks. This allows me to see where they are trading as well as news reports and SEC (or other) filings. Don’t simply rely on others’ interpretations of news – and don’t get delayed news reports that fly under the radar (domain sales for example).

Follow these and other related companies and be more informed as a result.

The Yahoo and Microsoft on-again off-again partnership/buyout discussions have been all over the financial and Internet news for a while, so I don’t need to chronicle those here. Yesterday afternoon, news broke that Yahoo and Microsoft were not only talking once again, but a deal was imminent. This morning it was announced that a deal between the two companies had been completed – finally.

According to Reuters, the upshot of the deal is that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will handle search duties on all Yahoo-owned websites, and Yahoo will be responsible for selling the premium search ads. This means that Bing will now be the search engine for nearly 30% of all searches, up from 8% in June according to a report from Comscore. This is big news for owners of generic domain names.

A few weeks ago, I posted an article stating that Microsoft’s Bing search engine seems to love developed generic domain names. I listed a small sample of search results for generic domain names on Google and on Bing, and they clearly ranked much better on Bing. While I was doing my small sample, noted domain investor Edwin Hayward was doing the same comparison with similar results, and the white paper he wrote shares his results.I didn’t report Yahoo’s search results, but they were somewhere between Bing and Google for the most part.

This is very good news for domain investors, because it means if a company has a generic domain name, it should rank higher for almost 30% of web searches rather than just 8%, making these domain names more desired and valuable. I won’t speculate about what will happen with PPC payouts because domain parking is a very small % of 1% of my total revenue, so I will let other experts provide commentary on that side of things.

I believe this is good news for owners of generic domain names.