Determining the "true" initial registration date of a domain name

[JoshuaPz]

Do any of you know whether there's a tool out there that can tell me, for certain, the date a given domain was registered for the very first time?

Right now, I compute this as the earliest of these 3 dates:
1. The first archive.org entry for the domain (catch: [1] archive.org doesn't account for dates during which the site had no content; [2] robots.txt can be configured to block archive.org indexing)
2. The first date with an NS history entry for the domain @ DomainTools (catch: DomainTools has only logged this info since '02)
3. The creation date of the earliest archived whois entry for the domain listed on DomainTools whois History (catch: For some reason, DomainTools doesn't seem to list all archived whois entries for all domains)

I'm pretty sure that the above algorithm catches the true initial creation date on at least 80% of all domains, particularly those initially reg'd in '02 or later, but for the reasons details in parentheses, this procedure's clearly not fullproof. Any advice from the experts?

 

[Dave_Z]

Other than DomainTools or any possibly other third party WHOIS history site
out there, unfortunately only the registrar and the Registry has the data of
when that domain name was really first registered.