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The Truth About Whois Search and Domain Inquiry Spying

Wednesday, 12 September 2007

John Berryhill made this insightful post about Whois search in a domainer community I belong to that I feel everyone should read:

"If you are using a web page to do whois searches, you are doing whois searches wrong.

The correct way to do a whois search is on port 43 first to the registry, and then to the registrar's port 43 whois.

There is a client program which does this automagically:

http://www.geektools.com/tools.php

The geektools whois client.

I have used it extensively for years, and it is bomb-proof.

There is utterly no way for anyone to know, on your say-so, whether a web-based whois search is being "watched" since what, exactly, is being "watched" may be something other than the input to that stream. You may have spyware, browser plug-ins, etc. that are monitoring what you type into any web page, so anyone is going to deny that their whois is watched.

If what you are looking for is domain availability, then you don't want to be using whois, but digg or some other program which directly queries the zone server."