The .co.cc domain isn’t an officially registered second level domain, however the registry offering it out, conveniently named http://.co.cc, claim that it has over 11,383,736 domains registered. That’s more than .UK and .ORG by over 2 million domains says The Register.

As Google has classed http://.co.cc as a “freehost” as opposed to an authority or government approved TLD, it has the right to block the domain from its search results “if we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost are spammy or low-quality" says Matt Cutts, head of Google's spam team.

In this case, the .co.cc domains was reported to have hosted just under 5,000 phishing attack sin the second half of 2010, which is nearly double that of any other domain extension available.

The .co.cc registry offers customer the chance to buy sub-domains in bulks of up to 15,000 addresses at a time, a service which Google frowns up, saying in a recent blog post "to help protect users we recently modified those [malware-scanning] systems to identify bulk subdomain services which are being abused. In some severe cases our systems may now flag the whole bulk domain."

The .co.cc domain is not to be confused with the .CC TLD which is registered to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a small Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. A search for site:.co.cc in Google currently serves no results.