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Registrant Search
October 4th, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
We have added a new weapon to our arsenal this week, Registrant Search! That tool has been in beta for well over 8 years and was previously only used by lawyers and law enforcement officers that inquisitively asked if something like this was even possible. I only took orders by email for the last few years. We have received so many requests for this tool over the years and used to run it as a brute force grep command against our entire database to preform a “registrant search”. A grep command and 2 hours later the results would come out in a nice format. With over 80 million whois records in our database it was no easy task to search for a string in every whois record that we had stored. This new tool is perfect for an investigation into what someone owns. Figuring out what someone owns from across the entire Internet became impossible after multiple registrars appeared in 1999, so this is when I started the quest to build the Registrant Search engine.
With the launch of RegistrantSearch.com this week we have made it possible for anyone to figure out this tough question of who owns what in less then a minute. What took us eight years to complete now enables people to do a search in seconds. The full power of the DomainTools database comes out in a service that allows everyone to have access to it. We used to charge a LOT of money to use this tool because it was all manual and required hours of work to run the reports. Our turn around time was 2 or 3 days and was very labor intense. The service we are launching today has a turn around time that is almost instant and far more accurate then the earlier beta system.
This service used to cost several thousand dollars to order but our hope was always to get around to automating it and then lowering the cost of doing business significantly. Today we are unveiling the service at a considerably lower price of $60 (While pricing for big reports can still escalate) the service is designed to be very cost effective. We only expect power users to use the service so the price point is still rather high for the average person. However if demand is high enough the price would drop even more. A paid membership to our subscription tools is also required to operate the “Registrant Search” tool. The great thing about the service is that it offers a preview of how many records the service will return to any user. It displays the number of records DomainTools has and how many unique domains those records originated from.
It was fun designing this technology but at the same time very frustrating because I have been wanting to launch it for years. We just did not have the resources or computer power to run this service back then. In the last few years we have been taking baby steps towards launching this service, we have deployed a new cluster of machines that run a dedicated search environment and handles all the queries for the Registrant Search system.
David Smith can not hide if you know where he lives, if you know his area code or zipcode you will know all the domain names that he owns with one report! Registrant Search is just too neat to describe in writing, Hopefully I can make a screencast of how to use the service because I think there is a lot of power that I can not put into words. People need to see this tool in action to appreciate it. I suggest you play with the free preview interface and watch the resulting numbers. If you see a report you like, just add it to your cart and purchase it. I want to thank all the employees here at Name Intelligence that have contributed to this tools over the years and to its final completion. After years of work we are finally here, Version 1.0 is out the door. Happy searching!
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Posted in Domain Tools Updates, Registrant Search |
October 4th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Wow!!!
It was always said this couldn’t be done anytime I saw someone ask.
Magnifico.
Patrick
October 4th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Cool service.
When it says “We found xxx different domain names with x,xxx cached whois records that fit your search” does it mean that there are currently xxx active domain names registered to that particular search, or that many names historically registered to that email?
UPDATE BY JAY: Historically as well. The preview will be a lot more detailed next week.
October 4th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Jay - what about domains with private registrations? I assume it won’t locate those, true?
UPDATE BY JAY: That is correct, it would not locate anyone with a private registration.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Interesting service needless to say, Jay. And it’s fair to charge for them, considering it took a lot of effort and resources to catch as much data as possible over the years.
Just wish you have an affiliate program, though.
October 4th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
I am really impressed, Jay. The average person probably doesn’t have a great need for this service, but I can see someone like Apple or IBM using it.
Ms Domainer
October 4th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
I would love to use this feature if it were included in the paid membership, but not as a separate fee
October 4th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Maybe you could include like 5-10 free queries per month in the paid membership
UPDATE BY JAY: 5 or 10 is a lot!
October 5th, 2007 at 9:02 am
Is this a tool for domainers or a tool for lawyers?
UPDATE BY JAY: Who is a fork for? Who might use a car? Who eats food for that matter? The simple answer is, everyone can use the tool. Do a report on yourself, Do a report on your buddy, Do a report on your company, Do a report your enemy…. There are so many ways to use it because it is just a tool.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:27 am
>>Who is a fork for?
It depends on whos hand its in.
If this fork contains every typo a domainer owns (and almost every domainer has typos) then I would say the fork is for the lawyers.
How many domainers have you run into that are willing to pay a couple/few hundred bucks to run reports on their buddies?
As for paying to run a report on my company, why would I do that? I can simply log into my registrar and see what I own. The only reason why I would do a report on my own company is so I can “see what they see” (like the lawyers).
I do like the tool but overall its bad news for the domain community.
I guess its time for typo owners to be punished though huh? Its long overdue and this tool will help bury all typosquatters.
Bad typosquatter, Bad!
UPDATE BY JAY: When I worked at a company with 200 employees in the 90’s, the lawyers couldn’t figure out what they owned because employees in different divisions would register domain names for the company. If a company owns hundreds of domains this tool is very useful to run on your own company. I have had numerous people come to me and tell me they register domain names at a lot of registrars and they have lost track what names they own. There are tons of examples where this tool can be used on yourself. I have a buddy that thought he owned more domains, they were not in his account, with a simple search I found some of his domains at a different registrar.
I just did a background check on a potential new employee, I ran his whois against the system. I found a lot of interesting domains.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Jennifer said it well in her post above…
“The average person probably doesn’t have a great need for this service, but I can see someone like Apple or IBM using it.”
Bingo.
October 5th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
I always searched for such a tool, and I will definitely use it when demand is high enough to lower the price (I’m curious to run some searches).
So start subscribing
Nuno Oliveira
CatalogDomains.com
October 5th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
“A tool is just a tool”
Indeed.
October 5th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
I don’t see the rest of the domain community complaining so far. Which one anyway?
October 5th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Something similar exists in the .uk namespace - the PRSS. It is offered by Nominet for an annual subscription. In my experience it is primarily used by lawyers looking to claim domains for corporate clients.
In some cases it even appears that the lawyers use PRSS results to find potential claims against a registrant - the domain name equivalent of ambulance chasing.
I hope your tool isn’t used in the same way.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
If you want to make your “tool” bigger and better, you should use the phone company model. If you don’t want your phone number in the phone book, you pay to unlist it. How about offering an unlist service? Seems like a great business opportunity to me.
October 7th, 2007 at 12:48 am
Great tool Jay! I too would like to see 1 search a month added (for a price) to a membership upgrade. Also, an affiliate program would get the service out quicker to our corporate clients.
UPDATE BY JAY: Membership is cheaper then the tool, so I am not sure that scales. Would people not just sign up for a membership just to get one free use? I would like to give everyone that has an annual membership a free search each year. So that is now on the development agenda.
October 7th, 2007 at 6:43 am
Doesnt work for me, cannot check out. Selected payment option, click continue and nothing. Also accidentally ordered the same search a few times, when using the empty feature to get back to one search it removes them but does NOT adjust the total price.
UPDATE BY JAY: Ah, I will have someone look into that. We are replacing the current interface this week as well hopefully that fixes it. The previews will be getting a LOT better and the speed should get a big boost too.
October 7th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Jay,
RE: Searching By Email Address.
I have run into many cases where domains were registered by employees not using the approved registrar and then someone forgot to pay the renewal few and I get to play cleanup. I would very much like to search by Email address but such searches yield only a small fraction of the expected results I know exist. Can I search on a string such as “@MyCompanyName.com” or “@US.MyCompanyName.com “? That is what I am really looking for. Generally I only get one hit, which is the domain itself.
Could I be submitting the query incorrectly?
Are there any plans to support Regular Expression (AKA: QED or GREP) or Wild Cards? Old timers like me have never met a QED Editor we didn’t like.
Mark Alert and Domain Monitor have been incredibly useful in monitoring domain activity but I would really like to search by Email address also. I realize that anonymous registrations are a growing problem but that is an issue which must be address through ICANN.
The real forensic value of this tool will be searching the historic WhoIs records. All that a person of interest has to do is make one recorded mistake in the last 10 years and I will be able to get lock on them. Unlike the Googles and Wayback Machines of the Internet, Domain Tools can ignore those pesky retroactive “Robots.txt” files.
Mike
UPDATE BY JAY: Mike, thanks for the feedback. I will make sure that gets put on the development list. We do full text indexing right now so I will be sure we break on half email addresses so that the index allows the search. I remember that is exactly what we did back in 1999. I found everyone that used a company email address to register a domain. That was the best tip off for our corporate IP lawyers that we might own more domains then what the lawyers registered for us.
October 11th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
How To Scoop Up Quality Expiring Domain Names…
I have compiled a list of services I use to help me acquire, manage and broker domain names. These are almost all free services that can help a webmaster purchase a desired domain name or get a name that is pending delete. If you’ve ever been fru…
October 18th, 2007 at 6:45 am
Hey Jay:
Well done, but I’m a bit confused. In your blog you say it is a $60 increase to a paid subscription. But when I ran a trial, it said words to effect of “pay $70″ for this report. So is it pay the increase to subscription AND pay for the report.
Could you clarify, please.
Killer app, though.
Steve
UPDATE BY JAY: Buying a Report can only be done by paid members. So the report may cost $70 or $200, but the basic membership of $15 is required to view the historical records linked to from the report.
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:36 pm
I think this service is ridiculously priced. Every three searches are almost the cost of a new laptop. These days of absolutely cheap hardware, I don’t think your model is going to work. The pricing is just insane and you are pricing out all the casual users charging such high prices.
Also, 1 free search/year is just too little. More like 1-2/month with the paid membership would make sense and can get you more users.
Finally, I found lots of errors in the service. It reports LOT LOT more domains than I own as being under my “current” ownership. Even the ones I had let expire few years ago, show up as currently being mine, although, there is a new owner in the current whois information. So basically, the filtering/comparison is totally messed up.
October 26th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Hello again,
I did receive the registrant report I requested and paid for in a timely fashion today and have already used the information and link your company provided to update my report to the FBI i’net crimes division re my ID/financial information being **illegally** used set up four spamsites in my name.
Tried to email your support staff with this info, and copied what I wrote in the FBI report, but my email was bounced back twice as spam.
Victimized again!
But thanks anyway for the service … as I mentioned before, I rankle that I, as a victim of ID theft, would have to pay out of my own pocket to provide this information to my law enforcement agencies …
And it’s a nightmare to me that my name will forever be stigmatized as the fraudulently registered owner of blacklisted spamsites …
but, even if I had to pay for your service myself to provide the information to law enforcement, ***if it helps to ID*** the @@###’ing creep who hacked me then so be it. As I mentioned in my last note, you do provide a proprietary and unique service.
Support responses are still not fully connected to my actual posts and requests (book burning???) but have no heart to dialog further. Will assume staff is doing their best.
Did have one further question re: TYK-568438. Assume I’ll receive email response.
Sorry to be short … hope no one EVER has to go thru waking up one day finding out somehow, somewhere they’ve been hacked and violated as I was.
November 3rd, 2007 at 11:02 am
Nice tool. Too pricey for me, but interesting to see that some traditional media companies have significant domain portfolios. Maybe “they get it” more than people think:
Chicago Tribune owns about 2943 Domains
Tribune Company found 8,603 whois records!
Southeastern Newspapers Company, LLC owns about 364 other domains
Augusta.com
We found 722 whois records
PixelWorks Corporation about 4,344 other domains
We found 5,553 whois records
Fox News Network, LLC owns about 134 other domains
We found 1,075 whois records!
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. owns about 2,829 other domains
We found 11,329 whois records!
McClatchy Management Services, INC (Miami Herald) owns about 785 other domains
We found 2,623 whois records!
The Hearst Corporation (sfgate.com) owns about 1,902 other domains
We found 7,127 whois records
Belo Interactive owns about 315 other domains
We found 771 whois records!
Google Inc. owns about 7,807 other domains
We found 309,824 whois records!
Microsoft Corporation owns about 11,561 other domains
We found 238,141 whois records
“Media West-GSI, Inc.” usatoday.com owns about 682 other domains New!
We found 2,386 whois records!
“Dow Jones & Company, Inc” owns about 906 other domains New!
We found 3,008 whois records!
“Reuters America, LLC.” owns about 324 other domains New!
We found 1,140 whois records!
November 28th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
i was about to order a report thinking oh cool.. 20-30 bux.. hahaha 150? have fun with that. u lost out on 30 bux. im not the only one.
December 2nd, 2007 at 5:55 pm
wad ya do, git sewed? i don’t see RS enymore, or is this another “paid $ubS¢ribing member$ only” .. hopefully this privacy invader is gone, & you’ll have to come up with more legitamate ways to make yer 1st million.