WHOIS who
The WHOIS service is basically a sort of yellow pages for domain names. You put in the name of the domain and you get information on who owns it (full name, physical address, e-mail and even details such as when the domain was purchased and when it should be renewed).
Sound simple enough? Well, think again. The WHOIS service was created in the early 1980s when all the domain registration was done by one organization (DARPA, which coincidently also created the internet as a secure military network capable of surviving a nuclear war). At the time it was fairly simple to keep track of all the domain name information however as the internet grew it became apparent that some sort of outside management will have to be introduced and in 1993 the National Science Foundation appointed several companies including General Atomics and AT&T to manage the Internet domain registration. Five years later the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was formed and took over the domain name registration which is done by many accredited private domain name registrars.
But enough with the history lesson. The problem with what happened since the 1990s is that the WHOIS data not only increased tremendously in size with millions of domain names registering each year (24 million in 2008 alone) but the information is no longer stored under one roof but in many different locations with no centralized body which has access to all of them.
As a result of this mass there are currently many many WHOIS search tools out there (here is one partial list). However after testing quite a few of the sites on this list I can say that most of them failed to find information on Country code top-level domains (ccTLDs – like .uk, .de etc.). This situation is far from ideal and we can only hope that some order will be done with the WHOIS data in such a way that in the future users will be able to search for information on any type of domain in one place.
However, after looking for a long time I was able to find one fairly comprehensive WHOIS service which seems to work well for many ccTLDs (you can test it for yourself and let me know what you think).
