Change could make domain research harder — A Google

Google made a modest change that could make domain investing more difficult.

The prior week, I was renewing a lot of domain names ahead of this stretch’s price increase and ran into a problem.

I look at a lot of factors when I renew domains. When I’m on the fence, and the domain is more descriptive than brandable, I often look at how many search results there are in Google for the term. If there aren’t many results, it means the term isn’t very popular.

But when I searched for the terms of a couple of my domains, Google didn’t show me how many results there were.

Apparently, this is something Google has been testing for a while. It’s the first time I noticed it, and you might not experience it yourself. Today, when searching, the search results were back for me (see image above).

The days of seeing search results might be limited. Honestly, I’m not sure it’s useful to the typical Google user. And as Google expands its AI efforts, the definition of a result might change.