1 Million Dot .CA Domains Registered

A landmark one million dot-ca (.ca) domain names have been registered in Canada. According to the Canadian Internet Registry Authority, the dot-ca represents Canada on the internet and is a means to verify you are dealing with a Canadian or Canadian business online. Dot-ca now reportedly ranks seventeenth in the list of internet domain name registry. Would be interesting to know how many of those domain name owners also registered dot-com (.com) versions of their sites and redirect to their .ca counterpart.

Domain name registrations, in general, are on the rise. As of Dec. 2007, there were 153 million domain name registrations worldwide across all of the top level domain names (TLDs), an increase of almost 33 million domain name registrations since the end of 2006. The total base of country code top level domain names (ccTLDs) was 58 million, a 33 percent increase YOY. Across all of the gTLDs and ccTLDs, .com has the highest base followed by .de (Germany), .net and .cn (China), and .uk (United Kingdom) and .org. tied for the fifth spot with approximately the same number of domain name registrations. (Source: Domain Name Industry Report)

But how do cctlds rank on a Google.com search? It seems to make sense that cctlds would rank better on Google's regional/local search engines e.g. Google.ca versus Google.com and would help to serve geo-location relevant search results. In fact, supposedly if you do a Google search in another country, Google is able to anticipate the user's intended destination based on their originating IP address and can determine their location and redirect them to the country specific site - which is a huge user experience plus. And if you don't want to be redirected, you can notify them.