Why we hide “unverified” instead of guessing

What does unverified mean?

Unverified means Webault asked the registry about a name and did not get an answer it can rely on. The name might be free. It might be registered. The lookup didn’t settle it, so the status records that rather than pretending otherwise.

What causes it?

• A timeout. The registry didn’t reply inside the window.
• A rate limit. The registry replied, but to say “not right now”.
• An ambiguous or unparseable response. A reply that doesn’t map cleanly onto “registered” or “not registered”, or a status code we won’t guess at.
• A registry that doesn’t expose availability reliably. Mostly country-code registries, which sit outside ICANN’s contracts and vary widely in what they publish.

The first three are transient. The fourth is structural, and it is why some extensions aren’t in the 532 at all.

Why hide it rather than show it?

Because the two mistakes are not the same size.

Hide a name that turns out to be free, and you never learn about a name you might have liked. That is a real cost, and it is invisible and painless.

Show a registered name as free, and someone builds a shortlist on it, presents it to a client, sketches a logo, and finds out at checkout. That cost is concrete, and it lands at the worst possible moment — which is exactly how studios lose a name a client already approved.

Any tool that sells domains faces this trade with a thumb on the scale, because a hidden name is a lost sale. Webault doesn’t sell domains, so hiding costs it nothing, which is the whole reason the strict choice is available to us. The full check explains where the three statuses come from.

Plainly

Unverified means the registry did not answer clearly, so Webault will not call the name free. Hiding a name that might be available is a smaller failure than presenting a registered name as available.

What Webault does about this

Unverified names are counted but never listed as free. Running the round again re-checks them, because the cause is usually temporary.

Questions

Related reading

• How we check 532 registries without guessing — why the check is RDAP and not DNS, and what a timeout is allowed to mean.
• Why did a domain show as available, but I couldn’t buy it? — the eight reasons, and how to spot each one.
• Why we don’t sell domains — the incentive problem, and what changes when a search tool doesn’t sell.