DomainTools Blog has an interesting article. It shows that by monitoring the registered domains of a Web heavy corporation such as GOOG, you may get insight into their strategy.

Oct 2000 – Sergey Brin.com Defensive Registration of a co-founder but they forgot to get Larry Page.com.
Oct 2001 – Schoogle.com Perhaps an alternative name to Google Scholar.
March 2002 – Fourth-Party.com Why would Google register this?
May 2002 – Fire Hunt.com Looks like Google quietly bought this company.
June 2002 – Blazing Search.com Related to Fire Hunt
July 2002 – Cobra Search.com Related to Fire Hunt
Jan 2003 – Charity Visa.com & Charity Debit Card.com – Perhaps Google wants to get into the Credit Card business.
Feb 2003 – Got Google.com Marketing department wanted to make bumper stickers or shirts.
Feb 2004 – Google MasterCard.com Google wrestled this away from the copycat
May 2004 – Google Time Warner.com – Just in case they bought Time Warner back in 2004.
Feb 2005 – Every Classified.com – Google’s alternative name to Google Base.
June 2005 – Free-Wifi.info – But they don’t own the non-hyphen version or the .COM, bad tip off they want better names.
April 2006 – Participating Store.com – Two months before Google Checkout launches.
June 2006 – Bay Area Burritos.com – Maybe a Google local search sample site that never launched.
Aug 2006 – Image Labeler.com & Google Image Labeler.com – One day before launching they bought the domain.
Aug 2006 – Bench-Index.com – Secret Benchmark Utility?
Aug 2006 – Beach Wood Car Care.com – Maybe another future Google local search sample site.
Sept 2006 – Search Mash.com – Registered twenty days before they silently launched this new search engine.
Feb 2007 – Guxiang Com.com – A miss-spelling of a chinese portal

Most of those domains are dormant but notice how the tool revealed GOOG’s plans early wrt Scholar, Wi-Fi and Google Checkout?

So now the question is, based on the recent purchases, what are their plans? Well, clearly they have intent to get into Mexican dining.

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5. The Not So Random Coin Toss

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