We have been trying out Google’s new domain management service for the past month, and we are impressed.

(Caveats: this service is in “beta”, whatever that means in Google-speak; it is available only to people in the U.S.; it doesn’t handle every one of the new top-level gLTDs — yet.)

But for all that, Google’s simplicity of UI and the overall user experience is way better than what we have seen from Register.com, GoDaddy, NameCheap, and a bunch of others.

In many ways this reminds us of Google in 1999, when it’s very simple search engine was a welcome contrast to the muddled portals offered by companies like HotBot, Lycos, and AltaVista.

Everything extraneous has been stripped out, and the process of transferring and managing domains has been made very clear even for non-technical people.

Folks like GoDaddy have a very short window of time to, literally, clean up their act before Google mows them down.