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How to check the whois record of an IDN domain
November 14th, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
Have you every wanted to check if a domain was available for a common word for phrase in a different language. Asking us how to do a whois lookup on an IDN domain name is actually a common question in our support ticket system. So I thought I would let the world know how to do it. Perhaps you want to look at the whois record for “world map” in Korean. Here is a step-by-step instruction on how to do it.
1. Head over to Google Translate.
2. Enter in your words, such as “world map”.
3. Select the language you want to translate into. Example: “English to Korean”
4. If your results look like, “????”, then you need to install a language pack for your operating system. On WindowsXP it is really easy, just follow these instructions for the Microsoft Language Packs on Microsoft’s website. You can enable this from your control panel in a few minutes.
5. Once you have the translated words and it will look like a foreign language and it can be copied and pasted it into domaintools search box. Then the last step is to append “.com” to it. Then hit search and it will auto-translate it into the IDN script.
You will now see if the domain is available in a different language’s IDN alternative. Be sure to translate backwards to see if Google translated the meaning correctly. I have been able to find a few very valuable domains by doing this. Full IDN support was just introduced to DomainTools today. Please let us know if you see any translation problems.
By popular request here are some translation examples. I translated “World Map”:
картамира.com (Russian)
世界地図.com (Japanese)
παγκοσμιοχαρτη.com (Greek)
세계지도.com (Korean)
خريطهالعالم.com (Arabic)
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Posted in Domain Tools Updates, ICANN |
30 Comments »
November 14th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Hi Jay,
Thats all well and good but how does one know what terms are used in each country unless they speak the language? Are you just converting english search terms into IDNs and regging them or are you working out what each country joe soap searches for? If so where can this info be found? Is there a IDN equiv for wordtracker,etc..?
Cheers from Dublin,
Alan
November 14th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Wait a tick,
It’s possible to register international characters? …
I wonder if this requires any special DNS server configuration(s).
November 14th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Great option! Now we just can put http://whois.domaintools.com/IDN.COM
for checking whois. Thanks
November 15th, 2007 at 2:59 am
Jay, do yourself a favour and get up to speed at IDNForums.com
.
This is going to be big business soon and you need to get up to speed as these surge into the Live Auction events. There are already a small selection of good Geographics at Associated Cities this weekend, but this is the tip of a large Iceberg. This is definitely an opportunity you need to exploit.
November 15th, 2007 at 3:09 am
Alan, to check popularity of words in many languages you can use Overture, or for Russian Wordstat/Yandex. There is an extensive list of International Overture and Bid tools by language in the IDN section at DNForum on a sticky by ‘Edwin’. There is also an amazing amount of free idn dictionaries and resources at idntools.net
.
In terms of checking the popularity of a good term you can first search the term on google, but make SURE you put “quotations” around the complete term to get only that combination of symbols together. You can also look at google pictures for relevance. The trickiest languages are Arabic and Russian IMO. In Arabic there are many ways to say the same thing, and different words for different regions of the gulf. Still a fair amount of good generics and keywords open. Russian is trickey, the words have many different endings, plurals etc. and in my experience you have to get the nouns and not the adjectives. Free dictionaries like rustran.com
are a big help for this language.
The double check…nothing like a native speaker to confirm that you have the top term. This can be done in the various IDN forums for free. (Note: Many register IDNs at Dynadot where you have a 4 day window to cancel if the term does not pass appraisal). Best forums for appraisals are IDNForums.com
, DNForum.com
, and IDNClub.com
(Chinese idn forum). IDN Club is Chinese language, but not that hard to navigate if you have some forum experience. Really helpful guys and good IDN sales as well from native speakers. Note on Chinese:
register Simplified Chinese (spoken on mainland), Traditonal Chinese is much less popular and worth less based on past sales. Good luck, still some good stuff out there at reg fee if you take time to search.
November 15th, 2007 at 3:18 am
Also, there is a free quickie tutorial on researching and registering IDNs that was written by one of the members at IDNF called IDN E Book.
The BASICS are free on the website, with a bit of a slide show that is well worth the look. A more advanced and comprehensive E Book is available for sale.
idnebook.com
November 15th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
артамира.com (Russian) is missing a K at the front
“kарта мира”
Your arabic translation seems wrong.
November 15th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Jay what are some of your top IDNs?
November 16th, 2007 at 1:16 am
Don’t forget IDNF.ru
for Russian IDNs. Good native language resource.
November 16th, 2007 at 5:39 am
bwhhisc: Great response mate. I will defo look into IDN’s! Cheers for a the info! Alan
November 16th, 2007 at 5:59 am
hey the russian correction was made but no comment to me
.. someone doesn’t want to admit a mistake 
Arabic is still wrong..
November 16th, 2007 at 7:31 am
The Thai translation of “world map”.com is:
แผนที่โลก.com
The term is searched for by Thais approximately 10,000 times per month, so definitely worth owning.
As somebody pointed out earlier in the thread, search terms across the world varely greatly, so you need to know what each market is searching for and register appropriately.
November 16th, 2007 at 7:46 am
The domaintools whois lookup tool doesn’t work properly for thai domains. If you put
แผนที่โลก.com
(world map)
in, it returns the result for:
โลก.com
(world)
November 16th, 2007 at 8:17 am
This reminds me of the time I saw someone vandalizing non-English language Wikipedias by entering obscene words into Google translate and pasting them at their respective Wikipedia. If you’re too stupid (or lazy, as most domain parkers are) to learn the language, don’t try to profit from it, whether it be money or laughter.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Please, when you run terms through a translator, PLEASE try to reverse it through the translator to see if it really means what you think it means. For instance, “Amazon.com
” in arabic actually turns into “Strong Women.com
”.
And also, before you try to look up these translated words, REMOVE the spaces. the reason why “World Map” is converted to a shorter SLD is because there is a space between “World” and “Map” and the the only recognizable domain (since spaces are not valid characters) is “Map.com
”
That is all.
November 16th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
hbanker seems that you’re jealous you didn’t get premium domains… Many domainers don’t even have to work due to this stream of income.
November 16th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Jealous that I’m not wasting domains by parking them? Yeah, right. “Premium domains” don’t matter much unless you’re parking them and looking for type-in-traffic. What would the end user find more useful, a bunch of (possibly irrelevant) ads relating to Arabic maps, or some Arabic maps? Leave it to someone who speaks Arabic and is going to devote some time to create an actual website.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:03 am
Alot of IDNs are getting traffic already… Sometimes it’s good to do some research before talking out of your ***.
“What would the end user find more useful, a bunch of (possibly irrelevant) ads relating to Arabic maps, or some Arabic maps?”
If you’re a domainer I’m sure you have a bunch of names “parked”… How is your collage of ads any different than what I have as my “parked” IDN?
I bet you can cross google off as a useful source… Top keywords have their results skewed due to heavy SEO. Also on top of that Google has sponsored listings…. So what about this advertisement/heavy seo scenario? Those sites aren’t necessarily going to be useful by any means.
November 17th, 2007 at 6:39 am
re:
——
”
And also, before you try to look up these translated words, REMOVE the spaces. the reason why “World Map” is converted to a shorter SLD is because there is a space between “World” and “Map” and the the only recognizable domain (since spaces are not valid characters) is “Map.com
——
If you are referring to the Thai, that is not what is going wrong with the whois lookup. There is no space in “แผนที่โลก.com
”, believe me. There is something going wrong in the conversion to punycode.
November 17th, 2007 at 8:42 am
guru read…. he said arabic in his response
November 17th, 2007 at 9:02 am
well actually the paragraph talks about “converted to a shorter TLD” which is exactly what I posted about (”world map” -> “map” in thai), so I presumed he was referring to the Thai WHOIS issue…. I’m sure he can clear that up for us.
November 17th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Jeff: I am not a “domainer”. I like domain names, but I do not park them: I use them for REAL WEBSITES (what a great idea, right?).
Google specifically marks their advertisements in specially marked tables and columns. I don’t really like SEO in general. I believe that if your website is good, it will earn a good place on Google and other search engines. None of my websites have ads, but I think they are useful to others. They are for the most part about obscure subjects, and are educational, so I have no problem putting them on Dmoz or Wikipedia and thus attaining a higher rank than the thousands of CIA World Factbook mirrors. I have a real, non-technology related job, and I just improve the Internet in my spare time.
November 18th, 2007 at 1:12 am
too late jay….
in hindi turned down a 3 million dollar offer…..
india.com
not even gonna be able to buy a premium for $x,xxx nowadays…
November 18th, 2007 at 4:56 am
Well, there is a lot of criticism here some of it quite justified, but it does show that in many ways you are a little ahead of some of the pack.
Why not go for the real high ground and make IDN an integral part of your live auction. If you do this correctly, you could make a huge impact on the market and steal a significant lead. Much of the US based community really has not got its head around that people do not want to navigate in what are to them little more than random strings of random characters.
The American market might look the whole world from some perspectives but soon it won’t be much more influential than the British Empire (where the sun never set!). We need people selling names that can present them properly or at least know what their English equivalents are and be able to pronounce them properly. It doesn’t take much of a genius to work out that there is an opening here. The Chinese domain market is probably rapidly approaching the scale of that of the US, but we don’t hear much about it. What I can tell you is the biggest domaining forum on Earth is Chinese and that last week the landmark sales confirmed by DNJournal was infact between two Taiwanese. And this is our script. Goodness knows what will happen when their own characters which are often held with more or less sacred reverence are popularly adopted in domaining.
Whilst Americans are wondering how the Chinese could possibly input their names into the address bar, the Chinese have created many billions of web pages.
Doubt it. Just search on 山东 Shangdong currently at Associated Cities Auctions. This returns 108M Google results. If you try “Texas” which is probably an equivalent US term you only get 283M. And don’t forget the Chinese Internet is still expanding a frantic rate. In a few year Shangdong will be the bigger term, and it won’t be long before China has a bigger economy.
November 19th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
i use firefox to convert the name into xn-… and then check it and register
like my name: http://whois.domaintools.com/георги.com
November 19th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
lol jay can’t admit guilt…. he changed the arabic translation and it’s still wrong…
also the phrase is “available” to anyone wanting to feed verisign some more money…
November 20th, 2007 at 7:54 am
As Jeff9 had stated, the Arabic is indeed wrong.
(خريطها – no such word)
(خريطﺔ العالم)
Current/wrong: خريطهالعالم.com
Correct/ change to: خريطﺔالعالم.com
November 22nd, 2007 at 5:49 am
Jay,
it’s GREAT that you’re moving ahead with this — I look forward to when it will be rolled out across the entire site!
Hopefully, your servers will be able to manage the ENORMOUS increase in traffic — I expect people increasingly GIVE UP on the SEARCH ENGINES that STILL haven’t caught on that large parts of humanity are not well served by the ethno-centricism of using algorithms that limit their scope to only roman characters.
I realize that expanding the functionality to e.g. the “domain search” application will be computationally demanding (for some languages — such as German — it may be useful to break up the task into two parts: 1. search on the Roman Characters only; 2. Test for presence of Non-Roman characters).
My shortest domain name is the Thai word for “watch” (as in “watch TV”): ดู.net
It’s a shame that browser development is also very slow on this, but I expect that if 1 in a million Chinese people work on this a bit, it should be “solved” quite soon!
;D nmw