It’s a URL you really don’t want to have to type, or indeed spell out to anyone, but having created a new parent company called Alphabet, Google nevertheless decided it’d be a good idea to buy the abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com domain name for its new outfit.
The Mountain View company failed to get its hands on the obvious alphabet.com address because BMW owns it and wants to keep it – a slight oversight on Google’s part, it seems. And as for abc.com, we don’t see the American Broadcasting Company giving that one up anytime soon. Instead, Google’s making do with the reasonable-sounding abc.xyz domain, as well as its newly acquired and utterly ridiculous abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com address.
Spotted in Whois records by eagle-eyed folks at DomainInvesting.com, we see that abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com was originally registered back in 1999. Google must have acquired the privately owned address fairly recently, though for how much isn’t known.
As DomainInvesting noted in its report, at the time of writing, the 26-letter domain name leads nowhere, although it probably won’t be too long before inquiries start getting forwarded to Google’s Alphabet website.
So why did Google deem it necessary to secure ownership of such an unwieldy Web address? Re/code suggests it might’ve been a defensive purchase to keep other tech giants such as Apple and Facebook from owning it.
In a statement, Google put it like this: “We realized we missed a few letters in abc.xyz, so we’re just being thorough.”
