As I’m writing this, DomainTools is down “for maintenance” purposes. I’m not sure for how long it’ll be but currently I’m being inconvenienced, especially since I want to use their WHOIS tool which I pay extra for. DomainTools offers a remarkable history of WHOIS data that has assisted many times with the recovery of stolen domains.
But that’s another story. Right now, I want to look up some domains, damn it.
Enter v3whois, a little known but very effective WHOIS tool that offers fast, straight off the cuff WHOIS data in a split second. Instead of waiting for DomainTools’ overloaded page that nowadays features banner ads, blog entries, suggested domains for sale and thumbnail archives, you get the output with a couple of AdSense ads. And that’s fine with me.
The benefit of v3whois is not only its speed but also its multi-TLD lookup. Sporting 25 (!) TLDs in one screen, the multi-TLD mode is great for researching the owners of a particular keyword. At a glance, you will be able to see whether there are German, Canadian, Italian, French, Swedish etc. domains with the same main part. And that’s an indispensable feature whether you’re buying, bidding on or selling a domain. You will be able to quickly associate offers for your .com coming from other countries and thus increase your radius of negotiation.
Try it: v3whois.com – it’s free.
Do you know who the owner of v3whois is? Are you confident that search data entered isn’t used inappropriately by v3whois? Those are concerns of a lot of domainers when using a new whois site.
Hi Jeff – funny that you mentioned that. DomainTools – which is back up and running by the way – has digged into WHOIS search data in the past and I am sure they still do. I have no idea who is behind the v3whois project and what their practices are. When I use a WHOIS tool I want a fast interface with little surrounding “noise” and v3whois seems to do the job well. I don’t consider BetterWhois to be …”better” 🙂 The bottom line is, if you want to research domains that you don’t plan to register soon enough, any domain tool has the advantage of storing and using this data. Network Solutions did that in the 90’s and again about a year ago.
hm… tempted to buy their source code to see where they are tapping into.