Apologies for my earlier tone. It seems there is some genuine confusion here.

Thanks for posting the link, it confirms my suspicion re: leftover paranoia from the Moniker fiasco. A couple of years ago Moniker was buying domains their customers searched and then trying to ransom them. It was a huge issue at the time, but Moniker was the only big registrar engaging in the practice and has since stopped.

Moniker is owned by Network Solutions. Although the OP on this thread claims he only searched on GoDaddy, its hard to believe GoDaddy would be pinging their chief competitor with domaining tips. The much simpler answer is he used Moniker at some point in the process, or that Heart Internet is a Moniker affiliate.

FWIW, the reason so many people fell for this is that Moniker had a really nice bulk WHOIS tool at this time. But no one buys domains from NetSol because they rip you off, so they would use the tool to find domains and then go reg them @ GoDaddy. That's when they would discover that Moniker had bought the domain and was trying to extort them. Apparently some people did not understand the distinction between GoDaddy and Moniker, and shot the messenger instead.

I'm not here to defend GoDaddy, although in this case they've done nothing wrong, so much as to refute an unfounded accusation made against a site I like (AjaxWhois). Nothing personal.

No offense taken, and sorry if any was given. I did not know about Moniker. Thanks for the info -- very interesting and helpful.