Surely in your various travels along the cybersmut highway, you've encountered a page or a webmaster that you want to know a little bit more about. Unfortunately, gallery reviewers and list builders encounter many pages with illegal images and submitters that cheat by redirecting or hotlinking. Finding out who owns the site is vital for numerous reasons. Whether to notify a host of abuse or to contact an owner to praise them for their good works, knowing how to perform a WHOIS search will serve you well now and in the future.
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"The Internet lends itself to anonymity. Many people inflate or misrepresent themselves on message boards." |
WHOIS is a search engine that will inform you of a second level domain name's owner. The COM or NET or ORG in an Internet address is known as the top-level domain. It tells you that the site is either a commercial, (COM) network (NET) or organization (ORG). There are other top levels such as EDU, GOV and even newer recently approved top levels like BIZ, INFO and NAME. The second level domain is the one that is paid for and owned by its creator or a person who has purchased it from a domain reseller.
For instance, the "CozyFrog" in the Internet address: http://cozyfrog.com is the second-level domain. When you type the URL of a domain in a WHOIS search box, you will get a result that tells you who owns the domain, where they are located and contact information and the address of the web server where the site is located.
People who purchase and register domains are supposed to include their full name, address and phone number in the contact information fields during the process. Unfortunately, full disclosure is not an etched-in-stone requirement for domain registrars and this results in WHOIS lookups with incomplete contact information. While some domain owners conceal their true identities because bulk emailers spam them constantly, I believe that a domain owner who does not give full disclosure in their WHOIS information is hiding more than their privacy. Nevertheless, even if the domain owner you are researching is hiding behind some lame alias, knowing who is hosting their site will come in quite handy.
To perform a WHOIS lookup, the most common way is to visit InterNIC. InterNIC is an offshoot site of ICANN. ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN are the folks who decide the names of top-level domains and also assign the numbers that are translated into Internet addresses.
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InterNIC gives public information on how domains work and also list domain registrars that are approved by ICANN. They also have a nifty feature where you can find out who owns a domain name called WHOIS. You simply type in the second and top level domain in the WHOIS search box, choose whether you want to perform a domain, registrar or nameserver search by clicking the desired radio button and then click the submit button.
When ICANN initially started WHOIS lookups, there was only one company who registered domain names. Now, there are multitudinous domain registrars who keep their information in their own databases and a WHOIS search from ICANN is not an accurate one.
A better place to perform a WHOIS lookup is a site called BetterWHOIS. Their WHOIS lookup tool searches the databases of all the domain registrars. You also get complete search results for domain owner, registrar and nameserver in one click of the button instead of three, like ICANN.
There are also many software programs that can perform WHOIS lookups. You can search for contact information without ever having to visit another website. My current favorite is a freeware program called Advanced Properties. It is free because it's ad-supported, but in the time I've used it I've not encountered any pop-ups or forced downloads. What's so cool about this program is that it adds itself to your right-click menu and has many more features than just WHOIS lookup. It can tell you the site's link popularity and what other sites link to it. It even analyses the site HTML code and can tell you whether or not the page has been mentioned in news groups. You can inform yourself of a plethora of information about a website by installing this neat bit of
software.
To perform WHOIS lookups, you can go to these places:
ICANN's WHOIS Search Engine
http://www.internic.net/whois.html
BetterWHOIS
http://www.betterwhois.com
Download Advanced Properties
http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/stories/info/0,10615,71760,00.html
The Internet lends itself to anonymity. Many people inflate or misrepresent themselves on message boards. They can make untrue claims about their power or build up their small selves by hiding behind a cool nickname. The fact is, unless you meet them in person, you never really know who you're dealing with on the Internet. WHOIS is one more tool you can use to protect yourself from exaggerators and thieves. When some loser tells you they're a big player, WHOIS can help you find out if they are talking truth or talking out the side of their neck.