In case you didn’t notice, the Internet has a new top-level domain. .mobi is for sites which support mobile devices, not for sites which are All Made of Stars. You can see the Wikipedia article on the .mobi timeline and companies who supported it here; I got curious about what sites were already using it (.mobi has been open for general registration for less than two weeks) and did some experimenting with Google.

The way to get page counts for any top-level domain in Google is to run this query: inurl:tld site:tld, where site is the top level domain for which you’re searching. Therefore I ran inurl:mobi site:mobi, and got over 42,000 results.

(Actually the inurl: site: trick will work for an amusingly-large number of text strings. See inurl:montypython site:montypython for a fun example.)

I didn’t recognize the top few results — companies involved in the development of .mobi and .mobi-related technology. Then I saw several companies I recognized in new .mobi formats — BusinessWeek.mobi, CityGuide.mobi, and several .mobi sites from mobile phone companies (duh.)

A few more generic sites were also available (diabetic.mobi) and oh look, there’s live.mobi, Windows Live in spanking new .mobi format. However there must be something I’m missing, otherwise the nice live.mobi site wouldn’t be giving me the giant Nextel ad. (All the other .mobi sites I looked at were clearly designed for cell phones and other small-screen devices.)

Towards the bottom of the first page for Google search results, if you’re getting 100 results on a page, you’ll see a square ton of parked .mobi pages, including skype.mobi, jobs4u.mobi, and one that’s really planning ahead — http://www.2012londonolympics.mobi/ .

If you’re interested to watch how a newly-released TLD is growing, put in a Google alert for inurl:mobi site:mobi and watch how the numbers change and see what domains get parked (and how quickly Google indexes ’em!) Hmm.. I wonder if ImAVeganAndMyNameIs.mobi is available?