I agree. Although not a big fan of GoDaddy, I have both searched and purchased tons of domains with them and atleast to my knowledge, they don't put a hold on the searched domains. You can do a simple experiment: search for the domain "acmenewdomain.com" in Godaddy, wait for a few mins/hours and see if it is available at say Gandi.net.
However, I can't say the same about Network Solutions.
For the paranoid, just do a whois lookup yourself. If you have a linux machine edit your .profile and add "alias whoise=/root/whoise" to it. Then create a file /root/whoise and insert the following line into it
whois $1 | grep -i exp.*:
Now whenever you want to check for a domain's availability, just execute "whoise domain.com". If you receive a blank response, it is available otherwise it returns the current expiration for the domain.
• what about the operator of the whois service you contact? My impression from some quick Googling is that whois.networksolutions.com is the default in Ubuntu. If you fear NetworkSolution's web interface, why would you trust their whois interface?
• AFAIK, the 'whois' protocol isn't encrypted. An enterprising domainer could be sniffing for promising lookups.
For the paranoid, just do a whois lookup yourself. If you have a linux machine edit your .profile and add "alias whoise=/root/whoise" to it. Then create a file /root/whoise and insert the following line into it
whois $1 | grep -i exp.*:
Now whenever you want to check for a domain's availability, just execute "whoise domain.com". If you receive a blank response, it is available otherwise it returns the current expiration for the domain.