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Witricity And Google
Posted on June 2007 
in Witricity 
For those interested in speculating on the new wireless electricity technology dubbed Witricity it’s perhaps interesting to watch how the whole concept propagates through the Internet following an inaugral introduction. I have been doing exactly that since MIT reported their witricity test findings on June 7th 2007, and Google watchers, domainers and tech-heads may find the following witric.com statistics interesting.
On June 7th at 8am, a search for “Witricity” on Google returned zero results. Yup - zero, 0, nil, zilch, not one. Basically because no-one outside of MIT had heard of it! The BBC picked up on the MIT Witricity report in Science Express and were the first to report it to the public mainstream with the article appearing in the early hours (GMT) of the 7th June - yes, I read it shortly after 8am! Subsequently, as the day wore on the BBC article became the first result to be picked up by Google.
By the end of “Day 1” (around 1900hrs GMT), Google had slowly registered more sites picking up on the story and/or concept and we were up to “330 results found” on the Witricity search. Unsurprisngly, most of these were fairly high-traffic news sites, although the odd blog and more interesting a site called “witricity.net” had found it’s way into the results. This led to more interesting discoveries.
A nip on over to a domain registrar and a search on all top level domain names (including ccTLDs) revealed that “witricity.com” had been registered back in 2004 by an individual who it would appear may have thought of the term first. Subsequently, “witricity.net” had been registered in March 2007, one would imagine by someone who was in on the MIT concept, but that is purely conjecture. But none of the other TLD’s had been registered.
The following day (the 8th of June in case you’re lost already!), Google steadily indexed more and more sources reporting on, and speculating about, the witricity concept. I’ll stop short of calling it a phenomonen as the mere definition is open to debate, but the word was clearly out. By the end of the day (GMT again) Google was showing a shade over 24,500 results on the search term., and imagine how many sites hadn’t yet been indexed! Back on the domain front, guess what? All TLD’s bar one or two very obscure ccTLDs had been registered, one would imagine largely by speculators. Oh to be a domain registrar!
Day 3 and Google seems to have stalled - results are hovering around the 24,000 - 25,000 range all day, not much action. On the domain front however, we’re starting to see variations on a theme with names like “witricphones.com” and similar product-oriented domains being registered. No doubt this will gain momentum, especially if the term “witric” starts to get widely used (I’m thinking electricity/electric logic here btw!).
But it’s a different by Day 4 as my first search of the day reveals a massive increase to 562,000 results and by 16:30 hrs it’s standing at 637,000 - clearly Saturday is Google’s Day Of Rest! Blimey…the word’s certainly out!
Day 5 started off showing 872,000 results before dipping - that could be a datacenter thing. However at the end of the day we hit the Million milestone with Google showing 1,0060,000 results. Now is the time to break away from this post and I’ve created a seperate Google Results thread simply to catalogue the result changes.
It’s rare that you get to see a brand new term or technology in full flood. You might be able to pick up model numbers of new products and follow these, but they do tend to propagate quite slowly in comparison to major technological breakthroughs or major new product announcements.
Remember the date: June 7th 2007. One day you might be saying “I was there when…” :)
One Response to “Witricity And Google”
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June 11th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
I was there when… Picked up witric.com.au and witricity.com.au. I registered the latter when Google was only showing 8 results.
I was going to put up a few pages and rank it but I got distracted.
I also saw your post over in WMW Supporters and that reminded me. Cheers for that and nice domain :P
- Ben