What is Google’s RoboHornet?

It may be nothing, it may be something.  But what is known is that Google privately registered the domain names RoboHornet.com and RoboHornet.org on February 17, 2012, then removed the Whois privacy and transferred the domains to its own name servers a week later.

RoboHornet.com (Whois) and RoboHornet.org (Whois) were both registered through internet brand protection company MarkMonitor. 

According to Whois historical records, Google chose to keep the registrant information private.  That is, until the record was updated on February 24, revealing Google Inc. as the owner.

So, what is RoboHornet?

I won’t bother speculating at this point, because Google buys new domain names all the time for a variety of reasons, including future projects that may never see the light of day.

However, after a brief internet search, I did come across a small piece of information.  On May 4, 2011, it appears a Google developer created a project called RoboHornet on Google Project Hosting, a free collaborative development environment for open source projects.  

As of today though, the RoboHornet project home page returns a 403 error.

Neither RoboHornet.com nor RoboHornet.org resolve to a web page.

Discussion: Marketing Land