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Australian Search engine Ansearch finds itself in hot water over some particularly ill thought out domain name purchases.

Australian IT report that the fledgling search engine have registered a long listed of trademarked, branded domain names by using the .com.au tld - examples include abcnews.com.au and microsoftoutlook.com.au

Ansearch chief executive Dean Jones said the company had registered most of the names during its launch phase last year in a fit of "youthful exuberance", hoping to direct extra traffic to the search engine.

"They didn't go very well, so we are concentrating on generic names," he said.

"We have had discussions with some (trademark holders) and if there is ever a dispute, we're happy to hand it over."

Youthful exuberance? Outright stupidity more like - needless to say the brand holders and some webmasters are not best pleased:

"This is a blatant attempt to exploit our brands and to siphon traffic that is clearly intended for our sites, and as such we take this very seriously," said Nic Jones, managing director of News Interactive.

You have to wonder what the hell they were thinking of don't you?

Nick Wilson is the publisher and founder of Threadwatch.org.

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