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Comment by OzzyB | Hacker News Reader

1,019 people +1'd this

That's what I see under the NameCheap listing, which is number 2, Wikipedia is #1, with GoDaddy at #3.

The GoDaddy listing doesn't seem to have any +1s under it.

Could this be the effect of Google using G+ data to influence its search results? Thus, by giving more weight to G+, plus, GoDaddy's sinking popularity "socially", equals, a drop in its rank.

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"name" is also in the URL of namecheap. It is very hard to counter legit sites with the exact keyword match in their URL, even if you have many more quality links going to you.

Try "hosting" and you'll see what I am talking about.

Not knocking your point, but https://www.google.com/search?q=domain+registration&pws=... also shows NameCheap above Go Daddy

See how it bolds "domain names", though? Google is now notorious for this; it will search for what it thinks you meant, rather than exactly what you typed. It's silently adding "name" to your query for you.

It's quite handy though, it looks for close synonyms where it expects they will return superior results.

For instance, if I search for "how to learn Castillian", it might replace that with Spanish since that also describes what I'm looking for and will get more results.

It "might", but in this case, it gives you exactly what you want.

As soon as you try searching anything related to programming or computing, where you need exact matches, you start to loathe it (of course, there is always verbatim mode). I've also had a case where it included the antonym of one of my search terms in its "auto terms". Of course, since this is google, all of these associations are probably auto-generated at some level. So weeding out bugs would probably be rather hard.

That's a good point, although https://www.google.com/search?q=%22domain+registration%22... still has NameCheep first and "name" is no longer bold.

For me it is only doing that in the sponsored ads, not the actual results. Citation required.

Google has a "verbatim" mode that does not do this. http://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=11&source... Still, namecheap is above godaddy

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