Situation:
I went to my favorite website to buy domin names - godaddy.com, and was
trying to purchase a .com domain name. Well the credit card
authorization
failed because the card was not activated. No problem, So I fixed the
CC
problem and tried to get the domain name the next day.

When I was about to buy it from godaddy it said it had already been
taken.
So I did a whois and saw it had been purchased by Compana, Inc.
(another
domain name registrar), that same day.

So I did some research on them and found out that they monitor domain
registry querries and selectively buy domain names that have some
significance and relevence in search engine keyword rankings. This
is an automated process.

My question is how is it possible for a business such as Compana, Inc.
able
to monitor what domain names are being querried?
And, Do you have to be a registrar to do that?

You can read more and comment about it here too:
http://ray-solomon.com/2006/06/10/dns-question/

Ray solomon wrote:

> My question is how is it possible for a business such as Compana, Inc.
> able to monitor what domain names are being querried?
> And, Do you have to be a registrar to do that?
>
> You can read more and comment about it here too:
> http://ray-solomon.com/2006/06/10/dns-question/

That page gives me a 404 error.

My guess, assuming you checked availability of your domain name only on
Godaddy, is that Godaddy sells the queries made on their site to
Compana. Otherwise it's one hell of a coincidence. Next time, run your
whois query on a unix machine using the ordinary client program "whois"
or "fwhois" and save yourself some grief (and money). Not that Network
Solutions (or Verisign, whoever sits on top of the heap these days... I
lose track) is above such shenanigans (quite to the contrary!) but
they're not as hungry.