Pizza.com Name Sells for $2.6M

In 1985, 6 were registered; now, it's 668K a month

(NEWSER) - The .com Internet domain name celebrates its 25^th anniversary today, and despite some rather sluggish early years the Web address has turned into a strapping young suffix indeed. A Cambridge, Mass., tech firm snatched up the first dotcom address in 1985, and was joined by just 5 other companies in the first year. But the Internet boom of the late '90s really got the train rolling, and there are 80 million active addresses today. More»

Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew domains, among others, will have support by 2010: ICANN

(NEWSER) - In the biggest change ever to the system, Web domains will soon be available in the native scripts of Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, and other non-Latin-based languages. A proposal expected to be approved this week means “Internationalized Domain Names” could be up and running as soon as mid-2010. China and Thailand currently offer support for domains in their languages with non-standard workarounds, ZDNet reports. More»

Firms must guard against squatters

(NEWSER) - The decision of an internet oversight body to allow more domain names opens the playing field to cybersquatters—who register domain names in the hopes someone else will have to purchase them later, BusinessWeek reports. No more is it a matter of simply .com or .net: Squatters may now buy up countless addresses, forcing brand names to keep a much wider-ranging eye on the web. More»

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1. Sex.com - $12 million (2005)
2. Porn.com - $9.5 million (2007)
3. Business.com - $7.5 million (1999)
4. Diamond.com - $7.5 million (2006)
5. Beer.com - $7.0 million (1999)

Info boxes will pop up next to your search

(NEWSER) - Google is rolling out a major new change to its search engine today—the Knowledge Graph . When a user searches for a famous person, place, or thing, a box will pop up on the side of the screen offering a concise list of relevant facts, reports ABC News . Google's database for the new tool includes 500 million people, places, and things combined with 3.5 billion items of information and connections. More»