Ansearch launches amid domain name dispute

April 2005

Local search engine Ansearch will begin commercial operations today despite being accused of domain name poaching.

The company, which has been in beta phase over the past few months, has come under fire in the last few weeks for registering common misspellings of popular domain names like 'yahho.com.au'. Ansearch is willing to transfer the domain names of any company which protests, and has even publicly listed a free-call 1800 number for complaints. However, there has yet to be any interest.

"Nobody has approached Ansearch with respect to their domain yet," Ansearch CEO Dean Jones told ZDNet Australia . "It turned into a very interesting storm in a teacup."

The company is in discussions with .au Domain Administration (auDA), the body which administers domain names in Australia, to iron out the issue.

Jones said auDA's policy on misspellings of popular domain names needs to go through a testing process -- a process that has yet to take place.

He claimed the act of registering misspellings of popular domain names was common in the search engine industry. "You have a current situation where someone like a ninemsn will receive that traffic if we do not," he said. "So on a competitive level we at least needed to explore it."