DomainTools published an interesting blog post identifying the various domains Google has registered over the last six years. After a careful read and a less careful analysis I determined it could be possible to predict Google’s future by:

1. Monitoring Google’s domain registrations on a “whois” service such as DomainTools.
2. Playing around with SearchMash a few times a month, noting any experience adjustments, and assessing their economic impacts.

The majority of the above domains are dormant, but note how DomainTools is capable of revealing Google’s plans. Google Checkout, Wi-Fi, Scholar, etc. were all predicated with fairly obvious domain purchases.

So what’s next for Google? I think it’s clear they are going right after Chipotle with BayAreaBurritos.com. You could argue Mexican cuisine is not a core competency of Google, but somewhere in those data farms lies the ultimate salsa verde recipe.

It’s also interesting to see Google get into the link farming business with Guxiang.com. I heard the misspelling of GuxiangCom.com is expected to push Google earnings up by $0.02/share…. Very impressive.

Last, is SearchMash.com which is a real domain with real traffic. If you are not familiar with SearchMash, it’s the sandbox that Google releases experiments in. The site has only been available to the public since October ’06, but quickly attracted 191K U.S. visitors by December ‘06.

Traffic has fallen off by 36% over the last two months, but the site features a handful of cool widgets that clues you into what might be coming next from Google.

Will it be burritos? Or will it be comparative analytical tools via Bench-Index.com? I’m willing to bet the former.

We released a number of changes on Compete.com today - the most noteworthy of which were focused on Compete Search. Although Compete never intends to take on Google, we do have access to useful information to help augment and improve people’s search experience.

Highlighted Compete Search Enhancements:

More results: We overhauled the backend to provide more results, faster…

SnapShot Previews: Many people use Search as a navigation tool and enter in full domains. To help them learn more about their desired site, users will now find a SnapShot preview of the requested domain in the upper right corner of the results page.

Compete Picks: We have made Compete Picks even more relevant. If you conduct a search and Compete Picks appear it means other Compete users spent considerably more time of the destination site compared to other results, an indication they found the site helpful.

Take a few minutes to check out the new features.

What else is new on Compete.com?

Sponsors: You will notice four sponsor banners on SnapShot and the Blog. We are excited to begin highlighting brands that want to get in front of Compete’s technology aware audience. Click here for more detail.

Compete API: You asked for it, so you get it… The Compete API! This is the first version of the API and we are looking forward to expanding its contents in the near future. Visit domaintools.com and find the API at work in the ‘Indexed Data’ section.

Metrics Matrix: We created a detailed matrix of how Compete collects and analyzes data compared to others, such as Alexa and comScore. See how we stack up.

In 1998, Bill Gross started a revolutionary new search engine called GoTo which allowed marketers to pay for search placement. GoTo became Overture, created the business of paid search, and was acquired by Yahoo. Google quickly adopted the paid search model, grew to become the largest search engine on the web and now stands side-by-side with Yahoo as one of the most prominent Internet properties in the world.

Bill is never short on ideas and moved on to create Compete.com (thank you Bill) and then Snap.com – a new search engine striving to “deliver a step-function change in the search experience”.

We are happy to report that Snap, after a rocky start, is slowly beginning to emerge as a real Search alternative in a market dominated by Google and Yahoo.

The recent success of Snap.com has been driven by two critical strategic moves made by the Snap team.

1. Snap basically shut down in early ’06 to overhaul its experience. The first version of the Snap site was a little too dense and technical to attract a broad audience. People came, they clicked, they left and never came back. Snap simplified the interface and re-launched in May ’06.
2. Snap created a free site plug-in called “Snap Preview Anywhere” which allows users to scroll over links and preview a site prior to click. The preview has an embedded search box that allows people to automatically conduct a search through Snap. Platforms, such as WordPress and TypePad have adopted the Snap plug-in. The brilliance of this product is that Snap receives free marketing and referrals for any sites using its plug-in.

Since relaunching Snap has taken off and surpassed the one million visitor milestone in January ‘07. I originally suspected that the burst in traffic was fueled by drive-by visitors who had come across the Snap Preview plug-in, but the intensity on Snap.com, as indicated by page views per visitor, has increased dramatically.

Snap has a long way to go before they begin showing up in Search Market Share reports; however, we applaud the turnaround and hope to see continued progress.

More and more, our clients and readers have asked us to develop a better metric for measuring the performance of their web channels and planning their online media investments. Although unique visitors and page views are critical pieces of the puzzle that is the web – these metrics often fail to accurately measure engagement on sites using technologies such as online video and AJAX. Unfortunately, defining a universal “engagement metric” is like finding the holy grail – it’s elusive, controversial and many will die in an attempt to take ownership of it. So while we all are trying to crack the code on how to best measure engagement, Compete has created an important sister metric – Attention.

We are excited to announce the creation of the Attention 200™, the two hundred sites that yield the largest share of our attention on the web. The Attention Index is based on the amount of time U.S. internet users spend across the top one million websites. The Compete Attention 200™ represents the best of the best each month.

Attention is an incredibly powerful way to plan and measure the web because it is finite and we manage it selfishly. We grant our attention to people, activities and websites that merit receiving our most precious resource – our time.

Because it is grounded in consumers, tough to game and technology-agnostic, we feel it’s appropriate to begin incorporating Attention as a standard metric when analyzing the web. As such, we’ll be introducing additional views and Attention metrics into our SnapShot tool next month. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback!

A few quick facts for you:

• 75: The number of days Compete.com has existed
• 150,000: Visitors to Compete.com
• 300,000: SnapShot views requested since launch
• 40,000: Unique domains that have been analyzed on SnapShot

40,000 domains!!! As you can imagine, we asked ourselves, “what sites are people researching the most” – below are the Top 10 most analyzed domains on SnapShot.

There are additional words on our post launch performance from our CMO and others in a press release we sent out today. Click here to read more.

Today is the day we all decide to become better people. It’s the day we take inventory of our lives and decide on one thing we can change to improve our health/happiness/career/etc. Today is when we declare our New Year’s resolution.

At Compete we have decided to help Mother Earth. After watching An Inconvenient Truth – a film by Al Gore explaining the dangers of the rising planetary climate - the picture became very clear – as a society we need to change.

The film affected many of us and many of us have begun altering aspects of our lives to help protect the planet, but we all need to make small adjustments. The problem is that not enough people are being reached with the right information.

Over the last five years traffic to leading green sites have doubled, yet still attract less than 250K people a month. This penetration translates to a mere 0.08% of the U.S. population checking in on our core environmental issues each month.

The release of An Inconvenient Truth lead to a surge in traffic to its site (climatecrisis.net), but after peaking at 340,566 visitors in June, the site attracted just 71K visitors in November. There simply are not enough people learning about the core issues and discovering ways to adjust their lifestyles to help save our planet.

So what’s the solution? If the former Vice President can’t reach enough people, who can? Lime.com?

Lime.com strives to help people live healthier lives. The site focuses on diet, exercise, personal care products and, of course, the planet. The chart above illustrates that Lime is growing quickly and surpassed the half million visitor mark in November. By focusing on the individual Lime indirectly promotes what is also healthy for the planet. Lime.com is more yuppie than hippie, but anything that helps people participate in the preservation of our planet is a good thing.

I invite our readers to find one thing they can adjust in their life to help preserve the planet. You might be surprised how easy this can be. Click here to see 10 Things You Can Do.

Get SnapShots of sites mentioned in this post:

• climatecrisis.net
• greenpeace.org
• sierraclub.org
• lime.com