Google Chrome Has New gTLD Bug…Or Is It A Bug?

As you all know I have been very vocal about my excitement around new gTLDs. As you also know I don’t think new gTLDs represent investment opportunities for Domainers, I do think they will be great for startups and small businesses. So I was excited to read this morning that Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry had brought .tatoo live. So I typed nic.tatto into the URL bar of my browser to get to the main page for the gTLD.

Here’s what I got:

nic-tattoo

Rather than taking me to nic.tattoo, just like I would get to tattoo.com if I typed it in the URL bar, I ended-up with a search result for nic.tattoo of which as you can see, there’s no listing for nic.tattoo. When I looked the top of my browser window a saw a small grey bar that said, “Did you mean http://nic.tattoo?”

I clicked the “Yes” button and then ended-up at nic.tattoo. Ah Houston, we have a problem. Google should definitely change this otherwise every new gTLD is going to leave users with the search results for the URL they were looking for rather than sending them to the site. The grey stripe that drops down will definitely be missed by users and since the search results don’t have the website for nic.tattoo in them, that makes things even more confusing.

Okay, now I don’t want all the new gTLD naysayers to jump on here and say “I told you so!” With anything new there will be a period of adjustment, I just hope Google makes that adjustment soon because as far as I’m concerned, Chrome as a new gTLD bug…or is it a bug?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton