Whois Hijacking My Domain Research?

eWeek has an interesting article about a new development in domain squatting. A company called Chesterton Holdings is somehow finding out when unused domain names are being searched and is snapping them up before they can be registered by someone else. All the domains involved were submitted to a C|Net whois meta-search engine that checks a number of sources. There’s no answer as yet as to how Chesterton Holdings is doing this, but until it’s sorted out I would stay away from whois meta-search sites and do your research manually.