Researching domains

September 11th, 2002
By Mark Gibbs

I don't know about you but I find myself researching domains with monotonous regularity. And while VeriSign provides a multiple domain WHOIS service the format of the results depends on which registry the data comes from and the searches offered are the most basic (essentially just secondary and top level domains with no wild card searching).

So, if you'd like a better and far more useful service, check out Whois Report (http://www.whoisreport.com/).

WIR offers all sorts of really slick features, including:

*Searches of historic domains.

*Searches of current domains.

*Searches of historic and current domains combined.

*Displays of results color-coded by Web site status.

*An option to exclude numbers or hyphens.

*Displays COM, NET, ORG, BIZ, INFO, and US top level domains.

*Wild card searching.

*Multiple keyword searching.

*Enhanced Whois capability.

*Block keywords.

*Search for domains with keywords in the same order.

*Option to block domain longer then 25+ characters.

The home page offers a search interface that implicitly supports substring searches (enter " gibbs " and you get a paginated list of all domain names that include the string). If you enter a top-level domain name it will be stripped off automatically.

The output format is terrific: Each results page (you can choose from 20, 40, 60 or 100 results per page) has a line for each matched secondary domain and columns for the main secondary domains (COM, NET, ORG, INFO, BIZ and US). Under each TLD the column is split into two entries: a link named " w " for WHOIS information and another named " v " to view the Web site.

WIR also allows Web sites to host their own search page for remote searching of whoisreports (http://www.whoisreport.com/remote-search.html) that only requires you to include the " powered by " link. And if you want a really powerful interface to the service, the company offers an API.

You can find out which domains are most active on the information page (http://www.whoisreport.com/domain-counts/) also take a look at Daily Changes (http://www.dailychanges.com/).

WIR has an interesting business model: " We do not sell nor do we advertise, our goal is to be the best domain searching tool. We will only make money by licensing our API to ICANN Registrars so they can build sites like this one. "

A round of applause to WhoisReport.com - Way cool.

(Local copy of Network World Fusion's Article)