DomainTools Blog

As the Reverse Whois report is one of our most widely used products, we wanted to write a ‘Part II’ from the April 21st blog post on this topic and review additional important product and membership aspects that users often ask about. If you have further questions about Reverse Whois reports, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

What are the options for Whois Reports? What is the difference?
As most users are aware, we present two versions of this report — the ‘current only’ version and the ‘current and historical’ version.

The difference lies in the scope of your search. For ‘current only’ reports, you’ll get a list of domain names where your search term is in the current Whois record for that domain.

For ‘current and historic’ reports, we look back in time to find domain names with Whois records that matched your search at some point in the past. You’ll also see Whois record dates listed when you choose historic. We also provide access to those matched historic Whois records directly from the purchased report.

This snap shot example below provides the preview of the information we present prior to purchase.



The dates listed will reflect records we have compiled over time that contain the specific target term for the search.  This will show the dates of Whois records that contain the search term. This will allow the user to know if their search string was associated to names in the past.  They do not necessarily reflect that the search string term is contained in the current registrant.  Users confirm this by looking at the current record which is also provided.  Verifying current registrant data at the domain name registrar also validates the information.

The ‘preview’ will show the dates of Whois records that contain the search term. That’s the focus of the Whois report – it’s looking for Whois records, not domains, and it’s returning the records it found. That’s why you don’t see records in this list for “DomainTools LLC” before 2010 –we didn’t start adding that to our Whois records until about that time. Matching records will be presented in the actual report. Members who purchase access to Whois history, either with their membership or via a la carte items, have access to the full ownership history, not just the current results.

The snapshot of the report below details that the historical records we have matching the target search term will be presented in the report. A real Whois History contains all the domains’ history when the search term is or is not contained.

Is a Standard or Professional membership required in order to view the Whois report historical records?
When viewing a report containing historical records, one of the key features is that you do not actually need a Standard or Professional membership to view the historical Whois records.  However, a free user account is required.  This is very helpful for those users who are only interested in the Reverse Whois service; no additional membership purchase is required. As long as the report exists in the user account, direct access is granted to the specific records that were presented in the report. Users who have a paid membership will also be able to view the entire Whois history for the name they selected from the report.

Are Reverse Whois reports included with DomainTools memberships?
Reverse Whois reports are available to any user without requiring a paid membership.  That is one of the benefits of using Reverse Whois.

We also provide a complimentary Registrant Alert for the term in the report that you purchased. You will receive an alert when a new Whois record is discovered that matches your search term, or your search term is removed from a Whois record where it was previously listed. This can be a powerful tool to keep your valuable Whois reports up-to-date at a very reasonable cost.

If you ever have questions about the information presented in the Reverse WHOIS reports, we welcome you to contact the Support Team at DomainTools.com via memberservices@domaintools.com.

The intent of including symbol domains in this original post was to share the “fun” single-character symbol IDN’s we happened to run across since many websites still render symbol domains. It was also interesting to note that Google recently acquired http://whois.domaintools.com/xn--dra.com on April 18th. We also wanted to provide basic information on IDNs for those readers who are trying to learn more about them.

With today’s updated blog post, we have also shared important information about IDNA 2008  and the fact that symbol domains will stop working with the latest IDN specifications.

For more detailed knowledge on IDNs, we encourage you to paruse this list of helpful resources (please share any others we may not know about):

• Unicode.Org
• IDNForums.com
• IDNNews.com
• ICANN.org

There are also informative symbol domain forum threads you can join in on to better understand symbol domains and their value from peers:

• http://www.namepros.com/idn-discussion/692177-short-idn-symbols-what-price.html

*********************************************************************************************
Post from Friday, April 30th with revisions implemented:
At dinner with friends the other night, one asked why he had never seen emicons used in domain names considering their popularity in messaging.  Think about it… Sacred Heart Hospital could use a heart symbol, Seattle Mariners could use a sad-face, etc.  After losing them in explanation of ASCII-Punycode translation and IDN’s, I decided the quick way out of the conversation was that they could not be used very easily by most users and left it at that.  It sparked my curiosity about symbol domains and discovered that they will continue to exist (as the xn--version) but will stop rendering correctly with IDNA 2008.

Here are some great definitions with credit attributred to Unicode.org’s Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) FAQs:
What is an IDN Domain Name?
Domain names, such as “macchiati.blogspot.com”, were originally designed only to support ASCII characters. In 2003, a specification was released that allows most Unicode characters to be used in domain names. IDNs are supported by all modern browsers and email programs, so people can use links in their native languages, such as http://Bücher.de.

Do IDNs change the Domain Name System (DNS)?
No. Internally, the non-ASCII Unicode characters are transformed into a special sequence of ASCII characters. So as far as the DNS system is concerned, all domain names are just ASCII.
What are some examples of  interesting Symbol IDN Domain Names?
We ran across the IDNS for COM/NET/ORG/INFO/BIZ/US and found a list of 10,386 domains which are a single ‘character’. Here is a sampling of some of the most fun symbol IDNs we came across. Again, this is simply  a fun list we came across that we wanted to share. Please note our IDNA2008 in reference to symbol IDN domain names rendering.
࿊.com      xn--3gd.com
♞.net        xn--85h.net
☂.com      xn--m3h.com (this one is SO Seattle!)
☎.com      xn--y3h.com
☼.net        xn--94h.net
☠.net         xn--h4h.net
☮.com       xn--v4h.com
࿉.net       xn--2gd.net
✂.com      xn--xbi.com
☺.com      xn--74h.com
✿.net         xn--odi.net
♫.com       xn--m6h.com
⇔.net        xn--17g.net
℞.net         xn--u2g.net
♡.com      xn--c6h.com
✌.com        xn--7bi.com
☃.net        xn--n3h.net
✎.com      xn--9bi.com
✆.com       xn--1bi.com
✈.com       xn--3bi.com

What is IDNA 2008 and How does it Impact Symbol Domains?
IDNA 2008  disallows about eight thousand characters that used to be valid, including all uppercase characters, full/half-width variants, symbols,and punctuation. It also interprets four characters differently.

So it appears that although individuals may have browsers & website software which can properly render the symbol domains, as soon as our software starts observing the IDNA2008 standard they won’t. However, even with IDNA2008, these domains are still changing hands.