Quote from: gm66 on April 30, 2016, 12:54:24 AM
I've been trying to build software to get the info i need, but programmatically it's quite hard, proxies blah ..

Were you looking to prove that .info's don't rank as well?

As others have said (and G), TLDs seem to be treated equally. For a while .info's were being given out for free, and they came out later than the other gTLDs... those two things together I think go a long way in explaining why there aren't so many established .info domains. 1) Because big/long-standing brands were already established and 2) Because of the idea that info domains are of lower quality. Maybe there's a monetising element to it also.

G is fairly scrape-able, though you do want to rate limit and it takes a bit work. There's a quite a few SERP checkers out on the open that scrape hundreds of thousands (or maybe millions) of search results a month

You can rank any TLD, but in most cases I would prefer a .com or ccTLD for longer term projects.

If the prices of those are out of reach I would usually consider picking a different name rather than going with a .info.

I think .info is used reputably (along with .biz even!) in some German speaking markets, but outside of those mainstream usage of those TLDs by legitimate businesses tends to be quite rare.

There are at least 3 or 4 big issues with .info...

• When Google's exact match domain bonus was absurdly high it applied to most ccTLDs along with .com, .net, .org ... but did not apply to .biz or .info or .us
• The point mentioned earlier about webmasters being skeptical or suspicious is important in terms of link building & audience building among other webmasters
• There are also some consumer-related issues. For instance, alt TLDs make branding harder & people are also most likely going to be less likely to click on a weird TLD in the SERPs when compared against a .com. And if you go to build a big brand, each $ you spend on branding will have some amount of slippage due to the TLD issue.
• Back in 2008 Google did end up purging .info domains, at least temporarily