I picked up a couple of domain names for joke websites and spamtrapping on Tuesday. I set up a placeholder page for each, and I’ve started writing and designing one of them. Aside from running one of the test pages through the W3C Validator and hooking one page into Project Honeypot, no one outside of myself, Katie, and the domain registrar even knows the sites exist.

Of course, the domain registrar has to share that info with the DNS system at large, and this morning, both sites were hit by SurveyBot/2.3 (Whois Source). As near as I can tell, they just check the home page of every registered domain once a week to grab the title and see whether the site is active.

And just eight hours later, Ask Jeeves/Teoma showed up. I assume they got the info from Whois Source, or maybe they’re plugged directly into the DNS registrar system.

It’s just amazing that the robots have arrived first—even before the content!