With Eye on Small Businesses, Google Gets Into the Domain Registration Game

Look out, GoDaddy. Google is building a domain registration service aimed at helping small businesses develop or imprve their web presence.

Google Domains is still in a beta invite-only phase, but once it officially launches, businesses will be able to find and buy the domain they desire including ones with popular suffixes like ".com," ".org" and new ones that will become available in the near future.

Google Domain sites will be hosted on Google's own DNS servers – which the company says guarantees a quick response time -- and users will be able to buy and sell their domains without being charged extra for private registration. They'll also be able to create up to 100 email addresses and 100 customized subdomains.

Related: Google Unveils New Tool for Businesses to Manage Their Online Presence

The company says users who purchase or transfer a domain to Google Domains can create their websites through one of their partnering website builders -- Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly and Wix.

Through Domains, the tech giant is taking aim at GoDaddy, which filed for an initial public offering earlier this month, and other domain-name registration companies.

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The move also extends Google's push to serve small businesses. About 55 percent of small businesses still don't have their own website, which hurts their growth and job growth, according to a study cited by Google.

Earlier this month, Google released its My Business dashboard to help small businesses manage their web presence more easily across Google's products from a centralized dashboard.

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