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Matt Cutts the part time domainer
September 16th, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
Who owns one word generic domains? The easy answer is, Domainers. It was very cool to find that Matt Cutts of Google owns three domain names and one of them is a generic word. Dullest.com is a name Matt found one day looking through the deleting domain lists back in 2003, when he saw a one word generic domain drop he registered the domain pretty easily, there was no automated army back then snapping up every dropped domain. I estimate that the domain is worth about $3,000. Had Matt worked harder at picking up domains he may not need his day job. 
So what is Matt doing with Dullest.com
?
He has placed a robots.txt file on the server that blocks all search engine robots from crawling his site. The one word website that says, “Arouw.”, I have not figured out what that word means. It is not french, so I think it is a fictional word. Is Google testing to see where that made up word gets copied too?
Matt’s most famous domains.
MattCutts.com is the most famous domain that Matt owns, he started a blog that talks about his experiences and sometimes things he is doing at Google. He is an unofficial spokesperson for Google because he understands the engine under the hood and knows how to speak in public. He also worked at the Department of Defense while in college and had Top Secret clearance which demonstrates he knows how to keep a secret. Matt started blogging so that he could see the same issues that webmasters had. He became a webmaster so that he could walk in their shoes.
The third domain.
Matt tracks down a lot of dirty SEO people. So I think he registered ShadySEO.com because he wants to secretly be one. It is that or perhaps he will publishing a list one day with all the SEOs that he has taken down and dumped out of Google index. Or perhaps “Shady SEO” will be the name of the book he writes one day. Registering a concept or idea years before you do something with it is required now days. I guess we will wait and see what he does with the domain.
What domain should Matt get next?
I think Matt should park a domain name. He would experience what domainers experience. Matt has stated that he will not run Google Adsense because it is a conflict of Interest. He thought about running Yahoo’s ads but I haven’t seen any on his website. I think he would be ok running a parking page that was powered by Yahoo. I bet he would make a dollar a day just because he owns the domain and people would check it out. He Matt, why not park Dullest.com and get it banned. Then try pulling it out of of the bad and building a website on it. It would be an interesting experiment that would get you closer to what we experience and perhaps Google would change the way they do thing for the better because of your experiences.
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15 Comments »
September 16th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
It’s fun to play around with non-words and then search them through Google; if nothing comes up, then write a post on your blogger blog (with ad$en$e) and discuss discovering a new word and its meaning. Wait about 15-20 minutes and then search the *word* again. Nine times out of ten, Google will have picked up the post. I did this with *lexiconnist,* a mispelling of *lexiconist* (which happens to be my only one-word domain–okay, so we have to start somewhere):
Meaning: a *lexiconnist* is a writer who misspells, either by accident or on purpose, a word and then tries to con the world into believing that it has a real meaning. In other words, a con artist lexiconist.
It’s harder to do than you might think.
Ms Domainer
September 17th, 2007 at 2:40 am
Matt will park those domains as he is very clever guy
September 17th, 2007 at 7:34 am
AROUW is a stock…
http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/market_quote?symbol=.AROUW
September 17th, 2007 at 9:53 am
haha, matt, the public knows all of your sites, well at least the ones with public whois info!
September 17th, 2007 at 9:54 am
shadyseo.net and .org are available
September 17th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
I hope this post is a joke. It’s as exciting as watching mushrooms grow.
September 17th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
so how do you find what domains someone owns?
UPDATE BY JAY: Reverse Whois, but of course.
September 17th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Well, axx, this post has received 10 Diggs. Can’t be too boring.
Ms Domainer
September 18th, 2007 at 11:45 am
“so how do you find what domains someone owns?”
That’s something I’ve wondered too. It seems like that is a service nobody has gotten around to providing. Alexa.com
used to have a section on the “site overview” page of the websites listed there that showed other sites owned (if any) by the same registrant.
I’d love to find out what names all my competitors own. That would be great information.
PS. Google is a misspelling of the word, googol. Now “googol” looks like it is misspelled. Good luck with “lexiconnist”. Maybe you’ll get lucky and make a popular site and people will forget what the correct spelling is. It has happened before.
September 18th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
and word on “so how do you find what domains someone owns?”
?
September 18th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Hey Matt, corporatemouthpiece.com
is still available. When the harvest season is over and Google starts innovating again, let me know.
September 18th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
OK, I have a domain that is one word, Ours.com
it is generic alright and its a 4-letter domain? So I am a domainer? then what? I don’t get it.
-D
September 20th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
So how does all this fit together?
“*lexiconnist*”
“PS. Google is a misspelling of the word, googol”
Matt Cutts
“watching mushrooms”
BS factory?
Explains Cutts’s stench & why he fits in so well at Google.
.
Even the govt is FINALLY starting to get “peeved” with Google.
Cutts going to one day need a HEAVY lawyer.
.
September 20th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
Arouw is the historical name for Wokam. Wokam is an island in the Arafura Sea situated in Maluku Province of Indonesia.
September 22nd, 2007 at 11:03 am
Well, lexiconist is a generic word, so registering the typo version is no big deal. BTW, the typo gets more type-ins than the correct spelling–go figure–though neither word is a hot item. I AM getting rather fond of the typo (which I registered by mistake), though, for it offers a lot of possibilities not having to do with a person who writes dictionary meanings.
You’re right: Googol has morphed into a generic term (and probably protected from infringement to a certain extent), but Google is a service brand. If one snags Googol and then parks it on a page that has Google ads, then TM infringement seems pretty clear.
But if the registrant slaps up a “googol = 1.0 × 10 to the 100th power” website, and sells math books, well, then, it would seem to me that Google would have no case.
I’m not a lawyer, BTW, and this is just an opinion based on what seems logical.
Ms Domainer