SEARCH outfit Google has splashed out and bought the world's shortest domain name, G.cn.

Most single letter domain names are supposed to reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, however there are a few cases of this not being so. Z.com is owned by Nissan, Q.com by Qwest, and X.com is owned by PayPal.

For this reason Google could not buy g.com because IANA would not let them.

According to Valleywag, now it seems that Google has gone one letter shorter by having a look at the country names in a bid to get the letter count down. .

So far there are no indications what Google is thinking of doing with the domain name. While punters could be encouraged to putting in the letter 'g' to get Google, we would have thought that there were many within its target market who do not know where China is. Those that know it is not in the US might have problems going to the Far East to see their search box, although they do look to that direction from most of their manufactured goods.

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