unforum

[pancito]

WHOIS help.

[Will 2.0]

www.whois.sc works fine for me

[pancito]

Works for .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .us
Does it do international and I'm missing it?

[Nighthawk]

The Europe Registry ( http://www.europeregistry.com/domains/domains-search.htm ) lists all the country subdomains and, if selected, will tell you if they're available to be purchased. If you go to the next page and one is "Not Available", you can click on "Not Available" to see the WHOIS (which even includes a screenshot of the site).

BTW: International domains ain't cheap. UK is the cheapest at around $20, but there are some countries whose domains are up in the hundreds of dollars. Trinidad and Tobago is 389 Euros... EEK!

*EDIT*
Alternatively...

http://whois.europeregistry.com/displayWhois.php?zone=[DOMAIN]

[pancito]

Thanks Will, Nighthawk. Europe Registry does a LOT of stuff. If only it had a 'select all' button...

Looking at which countries restrict and which don't is sort of interesting too. My question of the day... If I get a .cn (China) domain (unrestricted), am I subject to Chinese censorship?

[Nighthawk]

Dunno, but even though I used the Europe registry to find the domain, I registered it through GoDaddy ( https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/registrar/search.asp?ci=8990 ). Granted they don't have ALL the countries available, but for the ones that do if you get them they abide by GoDaddy's guidelines.

Looking at the GoDaddy list you can buy ".cn" domains as well as several other countries, so I imagine there are no limitations other than the ones GoDaddy itself imposes.

[Euchre]

You could of course use some of the official registries to track down the whois trail:

Domain name based
Internic Whois

IP reverse whois
North America
Arin Whois
Europe
RIPE Whois
Asia and Pacific
APNIC Whois

Basically once you find out what a domain name or IP resolves to via those, it gives you the hosting info so you can do a whois via that host for the more direct info. It's a sort of long way around compared to some other whois services, but it's free and reliable.

[pancito]

Thanks again to all. What I was really trying to do was find a quick way to go fishing for possible domain names. Say I don't know what the domain is but I suspect it might be cleverfold or clever-fold or cleaverfield, etc., and I don't know the extension either. Instead of typing in all I can think of, getting 'domain not found', redirects, etc. I can at least see if it exists. 'Oh, cleverfold.com, .net & .co.jp all exist. I'll check those out." So far Europe Registry works best for that because I can choose multiple extensions and search them all at once. This let's me concentrate on the first part of the problem, and I don't forget which extensions I have/not tried.

All of these are going in the toolbag. Thanks again!

[Nighthawk_NLI]

(Not logged in; public machine here)

Sites like GoDaddy and Dotster have keyword searches for domains, where you give it bunch of words and it will check for combinations of words, synonyms, etc... But they will only tell you what's available and will not mention anything about which ones are actually in use.

[pancito]

Aha! Tanks. Not sure that's easier, but perhaps for inspiration... I'll try it when I next need to do this or when my brain is working, whichever comes first. And what the hell are you doing working at 5 in the morning on Memorial Day? I hope you're getting big OT.

[redct]

If you're running Mac/Linux, you can just drop to the terminal and do a "whois <domain>". Covers every single option in existence.

EDIT: If you want to, say, do a search for "blah" with every single domain extension, here's a short script: