: Where can I safetly search domain whois without worrying about the search engine parking on the domain immediately after the search? There are a lot of companies that provide domain whois but
There are a lot of companies that provide domain whois but I've heard of a lot of people who had bad experiences where the domain was bought soon after the whois search and the price was increased dramatically.
Where can I gain access to a domain whois where I don't have to worry about that happening?
Update:
Apparently, the official name for this practice is called Domain Front Running and some sites go as far as to create explicit policies stating that they don't do it.
This is where a domain registrar or an intermediary (like a domain lookup site) mines the searches for possibly attractive domains and then either sells the data to a third-party, or goes ahead and registers the name themselves ahead of you. In one case a registrar took advantage of what's known as the "grace period" and registered every single domain users looked up through them and held on to them for 5 days before releasing them back into the pool at no cost to themselves.
Source: domainwarning.com
And apparently, after ICANN was notified of the practice, they wrote it off as a coincidence of random 'domain tasting'.
Source: See for yourself
More posts by @Voss4911412
7 Comments
Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best
There is better idea - you buy whois api access from Domaintools. Now suppose you want to see the whois of list of domains, select another 2000 domains randomly and access using the whois api the whois data of these 2000 + your list of domains. So it'd be very difficult for anybody snooping to know which is your interest one out of those 1000's.
If you're domains are precious enough then increase the domain count. Each domain whois access will cost you $.005. So for 10,000 domains it'll be only (plus monthly fees).
You can find list of domains here : Where can I download list of all .com domains registered in the world
Don't go through a registrar, but through the operator of the TLD themselves. They are the ones providing the WHOIS information. While that doesn't make it technically impossible from them to do front running (i.e. if they also act as a registrar for their own TLD), it means that if they did, you couldn't avoid it anyway, since any other service would request the data from them.
See the ICANN registry listing for the operators of generic TLDs.
I use instantdomainsearch.com/. This is encrypted search. And doesn't record your search. Although you can try its unencrypted search as well. which is little bit faster but records your search
There are some tools on the web that will look up domain availability for you, and that supposedly do not track these requests like registrars do. Some examples: Domize, DomainTyper, and Domainr.
I have experienced this myself. When searching for a client's preferred domain name (an unusual one, unlikely to be of interest to anyone else), the domain was available, then 10 minutes later, unavailable! I found an alternative domain, but had to wait the 2 years until the original domain' registration expired before I could claim it for my client.
Instead of using a registrar's search tools, use one of the independent tools out there on the internet. Good examples are whois.domaintools.com/ and www.whois.net/.
You can also check whois directly using the whois command on Linux (or similar).
If you have shell access on a hosting account you can always search from the command line there.
I have never had an issue going to the source www.whois.net/.
You could also download the Sam Spade software package for free. The software will do a whois for you. Either way I think you are fine.
Terms of Use Create Support ticket Your support tickets Stock Market News! © vmapp.org2024 All Rights reserved.