For those conspiracy theorist out there, we'll here's one that is currently bugging the minds of the SEO community.

Google has indirectly registered googlecheckout.com as explained in zdnet

The domains googlecheckout.net/org/info (.com is owned by someone else at the moment) have all been registered to a company called DNStination, Inc. Don't be fooled, the registrar is MarkMonitor - a company that prides itself on the protection of your corporate identity. There is no way they would let just anybody register a domain with "Google" in it - especially since Google is one of their clients.

Then who is this DNStination, Inc. then? Googling the address of this "company" tells us exactly who it is. The address maps directly to none other than MarkMonitor itself.

So for what use would be this googlecheckout.com? Firstly, I don't think google will register a domain with the word checkout if it is not related to the checkout process.

Many believe that is it a shopping cart system, which I think it is. Now, check out the timing. Yahoo + ebay went live on 2005-06-25 and the googlecheckout.com domain was registered 2005-06-26. Hmmm...I smell google's response to paypal.

With paypal being Yahoo's payment platform, Google has to speed things up with their rumored payment system, otherwise Yahoo will score a knockout in terms of access to payment system.