Google recently became the subsidiary of Alphabet and its Wall Street debut had the domain abc.xyz.
However, since Alphabet could not purchase the already registered domains alphabet.com (owned by BMW) and abc.com (owned by Walt Disney Company's ABC Television Network), it did the next best thing possible and went for a URL that would be in alignment with the company's identity.
Alphabet has acquired the domain abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com. This domain was created in 1999 per Whois and was privately owned. The company already owns the ABC.xyz domain, which Google revealed in August when it made the Alphabet announcement. However, not content with just one domain, Alphabet decided to cover all the bases and have a domain name with the entire alphabet.
The new domain's purchase was confirmed by Alphabet.
"We realized we missed a few letters in abc.xyz, so we're just being thorough," explained a spokesperson for Google.
So now Alphabet owns the 26-letter domain name. The new URL was espied by DomainInvesting.com who spotted it in Whois records. It is not known how much the company shelled out for the privately-owned URL's transfer.
Currently, navigating to the URL leads one to an inactive website. Experts are of the opinion that Alphabet possibly made abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com's purchase to stop the likes of Facebook and Apple from acquiring the domain - a defensive move so others could not snap up the domain name.
It is a common practice among many companies to purchase related URL names, so that in the event people misspell the domain name they are navigated to the correct site belonging to the company. For instance, Alphabet not only owns Google.com, but also Gogle.com and Googl.com. If the two incorrect spellings are typed, one is automatically redirected to Google.com.
The defensive buying is also common and it is for that purpose Alphabet also owns the domain name GoogleSucks.com. Traffic to this URL is forwarded to Google.com.
