Last week saw the Vatican announce it’s 266th and current pope of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, formerly Archbishop Bergoglio of Buenos Aires. Unfortunately in what seems to be either naivety or sheer oversight by the Church by not pre-registering key domain names, allowed for another stunning display of what makes the internet perpetually amusing. Within minutes of the announcement and in a modern day raid not unlike the Visigoths sacking the walls of Rome circa 400AD, the Vatican was digitally raided with some 600 domain names containing variations on the new Pope’s name being registered by all manner of would-be cyber squatters, pope lovers, trolls, satirists and otherwise bored netizens.

A quick whois search shows “popefrancisi” is registered under basically every Top Level Domain (.TLD) extension available .com/.org/.net/.tv and it moves from there with squatters targeting as many keywords as possible such as Pope, Bergoglio, Habemus Papam, etc. Looking forward to bobble head pope figurines from my personal favourite “popefrancissouvenirs.com”. The majority of the new domain squatters would obviously be hoping to get lucky with a modest future payday. The domain PopeBenedictXVI.com made headlines in 2005 when it was sold for $5000, not bad for a small domain registration fee.

Anybody who has registered their own domain name before likely knows a scaled back version of the domain pain the Holy See is now going through. Finding out that your first, second, third or even umpteenth choice for a domain & extension has already been registered by someone else can become acutely annoying. Be it something as simple as your name (it’s your name after all!), your favourite catchphrase, a witty pun or the latest genius business name that Steve Jobs whispered to you in a dream. Like sands through the hourglass, the number of domain registrations keep ticking away, increasing the likelihood that someones beaten you to the punch with each passing day.

The pain of finding out the domain name for your new site or business idea is already taken is even more annoying if you notice all that potential is going to waste. Especially if it’s being used by a cyber squatter, serving up some ugly advertising click-bait landing page or a ‘buy this domain for $1million‘ offer, instead of your great new online business idea or amusing blog.

Generally cyber squatters have two primary motives — registering domain names that may resemble or infringe on well known words or interests, existing sites, brands, people, or trademarks etc. Anything remotely likely to get people clicking through, in order to a) gain large amounts of traffic with little effort attempting to profit from online advertising dollars or b) “squatting” on the domain like property, waiting for someone to come along & pay top dollar for it.

Cyber Squatting is nothing new of course, it has always existed. Numerous people have managed to profit very nicely by building up “domain portfolios” and numerous companies have sprung up over the years to create an entire industry out of domain squatting & reselling. However, every year it becomes worse in an increasingly crowded internet. It makes us paranoid, becoming common practice to register as many TLD’s and variations as you can afford (Apple Inc. owns some 1600+ domains to protect it’s IP, several of which it has paid big money for). It has also created various trends we have with domain naming conventions, forcing individuals & companies to get creative. For example domains that make use of “tweaked words” like Flickr.com, or which creatively make use of .TLD’s like Last.FM.

To avoid this becoming little more than passing observational humour, here are a couple of my favourite websites/tools for helping you find great domain names before checking availability & perhaps registering them:

Domai.nr – Making great use of the the .nr TLD of Nauru the tiny Micronesian island that is the second least-populated country after the Vatican City (.va!), Domainr is probably the quickest and easiest domain search tool around. Type in the domains you want and it will show variations and availability with links to register.

Panabee – As above, only Panabee throws you some curveballs with a bunch of variations that play with your suggestions. Useful for when you’re really at a loss for an available domain name.

Dot-O-Mator – Provide a keyword and get suggestions, also has an iPhone app!

Dom!ze – Super fast and has some advanced option ideas and quick display of any “purchase” options that may exist.

DomainsBot – Attempts to give suggestions based on search terms.

DomainTools – One of the Grandaddies of Whois sites. Not as slick as some of the links above, but always a valuable Whois & DNS lookup tool.