[johnorourke]

Years ago, this used to happen a lot because registrars could grab a domain for a short period without any cost - so some of them would see you searching for a domain, and hold it, then try to make you buy it at a higher cost. I don't deal with domains any more, but I thought ICANN had put a stop to that practice.

[lucb1e]

I heard this rumor and to this day don't use purchase pages to search for domains; I query the whois database directly. If the TLD owner is in cahoots with scalpers, they'd see the search query come in no matter what I use, so that seems like the best option and it's super easy from a unix commandline as well (a whois tool is default installed or a click away in most distributions)