Whoisology A really cool tool for free

[equity78]

I found this site while searching last night, it pretty much is a mini Domain Tools for checking out all the domains a person or company owns for free.

I did do a complete review with screenshots here if you want to check that out.

Check it out at www.whoisology.com

 

[twomoon]

Thanks for the info.

Looks like they have some serious problems with database. Checked randomly 4 of my .tv names - they are not in the database. Checked by my email that I use for .tv domains (no results at all - only 2 .com's that have this email too).

Checked some .com of mine - whois data is not actual. One of this .com's is the name I own for a 1 year (actually need to renew it now) and it shows the previous owner.

In my opinion the most accurate for checking whois data is: who.is
They are refreshing data in the moment you're checking info.
Whois.sc (domaintools) is not good for checking whois data too.

 

[equity78]

Nick the tool is really not about checking an individual domain name at least for me. Being able to put in an email and seeing 500 names or say in the case of MostWantedDomains 76,000 that is my interest. I actually check the names I have interest in with DomainTools and if its old on Whoisology I actually like seeing who owned it before for free. If I put admin at twomoon.com I see 83 names that you own or owned. For clients I am dealing with that is valuable information on a competitor without having to pay DomainTools say $1000 if the company owns 10,000 domains.

 

[twomoon]

Nick the tool is really not about checking an individual domain name at least for me. Being able to put in an email and seeing 500 names or say in the case of MostWantedDomains 76,000 that is my interest. I actually check the names I have interest in with DomainTools and if its old on Whoisology I actually like seeing who owned it before for free. If I put admin at twomoon.com I see 83 names that you own or owned. For clients I am dealing with that is valuable information on a competitor without having to pay DomainTools say $1000 if the company owns 10,000 domains.

Ah, get it Ray. For this purpose - you're right

 

[equity78]

Doing some more research the site technically is still in beta and does not currently provide cctld data except for the .us extension.

The guys over at IDNF had a post about whoisology..

 

[alien51]

I checked the site too. I think it is broken. Even the Creation Date on some of my own domains are inaccurate.

Also, i think you only find it useful because it crawled on whois data in the past, then it got broken, and all the data that it crawled got frozen in time. Other than that, it's pretty much the same tool as many other whois tools out there.

This is also what i mentioned in another thread before, that once your whois data got crawled by some spider, it can get permanently exposed to the public, evenif you have ditched the domain a long time ago. You cannot reclaim your privacy back.

 

[equity78]

I find it useful for this very fact, I was able to give a client a list of the 8,000 domains a competitor owns and did not have to pay Domain Tools $999. That's why I find it useful.

As I updated the site is still in beta currently.

 

[alien51]

I was able to give a client a list of the 8,000 domains a competitor owns and did not have to pay Domain Tools $999. That's why I find it useful.

What i now do to thwart this kind of search, is to annex some random characters at the end of my registrant "company" info. Then i use the domain email address as a mail forwarder that forwards to the real email address i open everyday. So if i have 400 domains, they all forward their emails to just one separate private email add.

This way, if someone tries to search me out, they can't "readily" discover that i'm some domainer.

That's for domains i didn't pay for whois privacy, of course.

 

[equity78]

That's a smart strategy. Is it a lot of work ?

 

[-NC-]

i use the domain email address as a mail forwarder

Are you using your registrars mail forwarding? If so you have to use their nameservers right?

 

[alien51]

That's a smart strategy. Is it a lot of work ?

Not really.

You just set the company name one time during reg. Say, i just type "Global Domains KZP", next domain "Global Domains PMG", and so forth. Unless the whois algo allows a wild card search like: Global Domains * (asterisk). In such case, i probably could use "Global 5Domains", then "Global 6Domains", and so forth. I find based on my research that UDRPs are not super strict when it comes to company name. You just need a valid email address.

More or less, takes about 10 minutes to setup, including the email on my webhost.

If you are a domainer whose business model is based on "fast inventory movement". This could be a hassle if you are setting up 10-20 domains per day, only to dispose them within 3 days.

---------- Post added at 03:32 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:30 AM ----------

Are you using your registrars mail forwarding? If so you have to use their nameservers right?

No. I use mail forwarding from my webhost provider.

And since i am on shared hosting account, there must be thousands of domains on the same IP address. Someone trying to search thru that IP will have to do more commonality matching work to guess which domains belong to me.

 

[Smith]

Hey Everyone.

Whoisology is a little project that we've been playing with for a couple months. It is basically a research tool that we created for our own use, but thought it was too interesting not to share.

It is in early beta. What this means is that it's not finished, some stuff may not work entirely as it is intended, and some stuff is broken.

We're going to spend more time on it as we go forward and I think that people will generally like how things play out.


Now ... Have fun, but keep this in mind:


1. We are just a general research tool.


2. The data is not live. We are not a whois lookup site. We'll add that feature in shortly I imagine, but the data used for comparative searches is sourced over a period of time. We will be implementing more frequent updates in the future, but it will never be live.


3. The data is not complete. There are a lot of domains. Tons. We can't have complete records, it's just not possible.

We also only cover the below extensions currently:

.com .net .org .info .biz .us .mobi .pro .coop


4. This is not a cheap site to run. Expect that we will be adding advertising to help cover costs. We're hoping to break even on it's operations at best.


5. This is not our main focus. We will be working on it in our free time. BUT as DomainAgents is becoming a serious machine this free time is limited.


6. Feel free to quote our info. But be cool and link to us.


Thanks for blogging about us Ray!


I'm glad to see most people so far are enjoying the site. Make sure to tell all your friends!

Happy to answer any questions.

Phil

 

[equity78]

Thanks for posting Phil and thanks for the site.

 

[indiegrind]

Im using it to see who owned domains before I did, and to see if they were domainers,.then peek at their portfolios.

 

[DomainAgents]

Glad you guys like it. If there are any features you think we should add. Please let us know.

-Ryan

 

[dompro]

nothing works right now including queries they advertise on the front page such as "Click here to see which domains are owned by: Google." or Democratic Party

---------- Post added at 10:00 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:58 AM ----------

Scratch that there was small "Processing" that i did not notice, works good

 

[DomainAgents]

There were some issues earlier today. Should be working now.

 

[DomainAgents]

Just an update, we've got more fields indexed now. For example, you can find domains registered with the same phone number.
http://whoisology.com/telephone/14165350123?section=admin

 

[Kate]

Very nice, but how do we opt out of this nice privacy-stealing tool ?

 

[alien51]

i'll have to put phony phone numbers on my whois now. My real phone number is on the domain's front landing page embedded in JPEG format.

 

[DomainAgents]

Most fields are indexed now. So you can see domains at the same address, city, name server etc.

All for free of course.

 

[verbster]

I found this site while searching last night, it pretty much is a mini Domain Tools for checking out all the domains a person or company owns for free.

I did do a complete review with screenshots here if you want to check that out.

Check it out at www.whoisology.com

Nice tool, but what's with the "DomainAgents" promising to get the owner to respond to an offer?

I think other services like this allow you to delist your domains one by one.

 

[equity78]

Domain Agents is another service Verbster, whoisology was a site created by the owners but Domain Agents is another type of site.

 

[DomainAgents]

Correct, equity78. DomainAgents is a buyer brokerage service. We guarantee that we will present your offer to the domain owner and if we don't you get a free credit to make another offer on a different domain.

Whoisology is a side project we've created for the domain community. It's using public Whois data, we're just making it easier to find the connections between whois records. There are many privacy services you can use to hide your Whois info from the public domain.

 

[verbster]

Correct, equity78. DomainAgents is a buyer brokerage service. We guarantee that we will present your offer to the domain owner and if we don't you get a free credit to make another offer on a different domain.

Whoisology is a side project we've created for the domain community. It's using public Whois data, we're just making it easier to find the connections between whois records. There are many privacy services you can use to hide your Whois info from the public domain.

Yes, I understand they provide a different service. My comment was directed at the "we guarantee" part of the service because I see in my own domain searches that several domains I no longer own, and haven't for several months, are still listed as mine.