I’ve noticed something when performing Whois lookups at DomainTools for domain names registered at Godaddy, and I believe it is a fairly recent change. Instead of providing the full registrant information, there is a link to the Whois lookup page at Godaddy.
Interestingly, however, when you do a Whois lookup of a Godaddy-registered domain name at iWhois.com, the full Whois information is available.
When you visit the linked page on the Godaddy website, you are first met with the available domain names with the same term in other top level domain name extensions. Below this are available alternative domain names that can be hand registered, and further below this are premium domain names that can cost in the thousands of dollars.
There is also a link to Godaddy’s Domain Buy Service to help you acquire the domain name that is being looked up. Finally, below all of this, you can see the domain registrant information.
Although this is a bit annoying for me when using DomainTools to lookup domain names, it is probably a shrewd financial move by Godaddy.
Standard Whois Lookup at DomainTools:
Whois Lookup at DomainTools for name registered at Godaddy
Whois Lookup at iWhois.com for name registered at Godaddy
I miss the old DomainTools with full Godaddy info…please bring back.
I noticed that yesterday and today as well on Godaddy domains. It also messes up the Registrant Search DomainTools offers as it shows no data.
There are several issues with the scraping or storing of cached WHOIS within European jurisdictions. Look at how DomainTools handles .co.uk and .eu domains. We have also had an associated issue with the scraping of web content – For example, we’ve found them not to honor the robot.txt directives.
With regards to WHOIS there are a number of serious issues on associating domain ownership from more than a single WHOIS lookup at any given point in time.
Historical WHOIS for example should be authoritative and subject to various legal requirements. For example one of the main reasons for WHOIS privacy is the safety of the website owner especially for contentious subject matters. Most users are not even aware of services like DomainTools and how they are combining the data they gain from public WHOIS databases.
What happens if a Women’s Refuge Center registers a domain in their own name and then converts to privacy before the site goes live?
Another problem is aggregating of all the domains someone owns. It makes it unnecessarily difficult for companies if people can easily become aware of new products or new intentions before any official announcements simply from monitoring a list of newly registered domains. This sought of thing just casts the whole domain industry in a bad light.
I still get emails related to domains I deleted a couple of years ago and I have to imagine it is due to scraped Whois info. If Godaddy’s move aids in privacy and also generates some additional Godaddy Premium Listings sales, that’s great. Most of my domains are registered with Godaddy.
I have noticed in my own searches for names that GoDaddy seems to show less information from IP’s that have sent a lot of whois requests (I don’t have a clue what the magic number might be).
I get different results from different servers doing command-line whois lookups.
They’re probably doing it to inhibit data scraping, as mentioned here, but it’s annoying. Also don’t know if that’s what’s happening for DomainTools, either. You’d think it would’ve happened long ago, if that’s what it was.
I was a little ticked when I first noticed this 2 or 3 days ago myself.
But since I have most of my .coms that are for sale listed through the GoDaddy Premium Listings it might lead to a few more sales.
Only time will tell.
Joey Starkey
Memphis Domain Broker
This isn’t anything new. I have seen this on whois.net for the past 2 years. It looks to me that GoDaddy protects the information, so that the person has to go on to GoDaddy to find the Whois information. I do remember seeing this for another company but can’t think of it.
It’s definitely new on DomainTools… I use the site many times daily and I just started noticing this.