Buying an expired domain name

Back around 2001, 2002 I was visiting a video game site. I changed jobs, moved, and during all of that I stopped visiting the site for a couple of years.

About 3 or 4 years ago I went back to the site (2008), only to find out the name had expired.

I bought the domain name as fast as I could.

After I bought the domain name I started looking for backlinks, and through archive.org.

Come to find out, a couple of college guys had opened the site all the way back in 1999. They kept it alive from 1999 to around 2004, when they lost interest in the game and let the domain name expire.

One of parked domain companies bought the name, and parked it for around 3 years.

I bought the name in something like 2008, after the parking company let the name expire.

When I installed wordpress, the site recovered its decade old ranking in a matter of days. Looking through google webmaster tools I found links that were almost decade old that the college kids had posted back in 1999, 2000, and 2001.

How would I have know in 2008 that the domain name had been used before? Unless I did some research, or visited the site before.

If you go to godaddy or namecheap and buy a domain name, does not mean it has not been used before.