To clarify:

* Google isn't a domain registrar. If they were then one would hope that google.com would be registered under them, not markmonitor.com (a popular corporate registrar)

* The server hostname is a subdomain of amazonaws.com and doesn't require registration.

* In fact, the entire name is autogenerated from the IP address using a simple substitution rule.

* I'm not sure how Google finds these, because their own "what links here" doesn't turn anything up.

* Side note: while searching for backlinks in Google, I noticed that this article seems to have been copypasta'd to a dozen other blogs. That's SEO, baby!

EDIT: Damnit HN, you look like reddit, why can't you use a sane text preprocessor like reddit?

... Google is a registrar and has been since 2005.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/01/31/google_is_now_a...

http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/accredited-list.html

Thanks for correcting me, I've never used google apps so I'd never noticed you could register domains there. Personally I'd still register my own domains elsewhere as I've had bad experiences with combined registration and hosting, and even the almighty Google has been known to partake in shenanigans.

In any case I'm pretty sure you don't even have to be a registrar to get lists of newly registered domains, not that it matters because the rest of my post addresses why registration has nothing to do with this.

* Google isn't a domain registrar. If they were then one would hope that google.com would be registered under them, not markmonitor.com (a popular corporate registrar) As pointed out, Google is a domain registrar - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/01/google_domain_seller...

The server hostname is a subdomain of amazonaws.com and doesn't require registration. * In fact, the entire name is autogenerated from the IP address using a simple substitution rule.

I don't have technical answers to these

* I'm not sure how Google finds these, because their own "what links here" doesn't turn anything up. Google has a tonne of ways we don't know about for finding domains, there is at least one case I've seen where a deep URL has been indexed after only a mention in gmail

* Side note: while searching for backlinks in Google, I noticed that this article seems to have been copypasta'd to a dozen other blogs. That's SEO, baby!

Thats actually content scraping and aggregation, SEOMoz has a tendancy to get there articles ripped off with much haste and from 150+ blogs (I have been mentioned in them a few times and they always set my Google Alerts wacky)

Which brings up a good point: how _does_ google find these domains? Are they just blindly scanning the entire IP block?

It's possible another user of that DNS name (they do get reused) linked to it at some point and Google picked it up.