DomainTools Blog

Have you ever read a story on news site or blog about how a well-known company is planning a new product or service, which is based on the domain names it has recently registered? Have you ever wondered how the writer came across their information?

Last week, TechCrunch spotted that Google had become the proud owner of Android.me, for example. Gaming blogs were also filled with the news that Activision had registered over a dozen domains related to possible future games in its Call of Duty franchise. The news that Warner Bros is fighting for the domain TheHangover3.com strongly suggests it is planning another movie sequel.

One way to discover this kind of information would be to do a random Whois search every day on the domains you guess a company might want to register. If you have that much time to kill, good luck!

There are quicker ways, fortunately. DomainTools subscribers receive timely data about the companies that interest them, delivered direct to their in-boxes every day, after signing up to one of our suite of domain monitoring tools, such as Registrant Alert.

These tools are not only useful for bloggers or fans of particular brands. If you’re a company in a competitive marketplace, knowing which domain names your rivals are registering or buying could prove to be priceless business intelligence. Registrant Alert quite simply emails you every day with a complete list of the domain names that have just started using your chosen keywords in the Whois record. The alerts cover newly registered domains (such as the Call of Duty domains Activision defensively registered), deleting domains, as well as domains that have changed ownership (such as Android.me).

Registrant Alerts are very easy to set up. If you’ve ever used a Google Alert, it’s just as simple. If you are interested in what Apple has planned, monitoring for “Apple Inc” will alert you whenever the company shows up as the registrant of a domain. Be careful not to be overly broad in your query, if you want to avoid receiving too many false positives.

That’s just one way DomainTools enables you to keep track of what your favorite companies – or your competitors – are doing with domain names. If you are more technically minded, you could use Name Server Alert or one of our other monitoring tools, but I will discuss those in a future post.

Next time, I will look at how companies differ in the timing of their product-related domain name registrations, and why there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy.

With the launch of .xxx domain names coming soon, I thought now would be a good time to address an important topic sometimes overlooked by domain buyers: how to avoid accidentally purchasing a domain that was once used for pornography.

Almost as long as the web has been around, companies have been selling content filtering software. Parents and network admins can use it to stop their kids, employees or users from accessing inappropriate web sites at work and at home, or in colleges, schools and libraries.

It can be quite difficult to get a domain name removed from one of these legacy block-lists, especially if the company that originally compiled it is no longer around.   You may find yourself cut off from some potential customers when purchasing a domain on a blocked list.

As a result, if you plan to invest in a domain name that was once used to host pornographic content, you may find that its resale value is not what you thought. The same can be said if you are interested in purchasing a domain for the value it has in adult traffic.   So it’s important to know what a domain has been used for before deciding whether to buy it and how much to offer.

As you can see from the small number of premium names already released by the .xxx registry, it’s sometimes not easy to tell whether a domain has hosted adult content just by looking at the domain name itself.

It should be obvious what you will find if you point your browser to casting.xxx or muscle.xxx, which were some of the first .xxx domains to be sold, but can you say the same about casting.com or muscle.com? They could be porn, or they could just as easily belong to a Hollywood casting agency or be used to sell dietary supplements and home gym equipment.

Common dictionary words sometimes have special meanings in the adult entertainment world that might not be obvious to somebody from outside that industry, which is why it’s important to do your research before making an offer.

Adult content publishers often trade under generic-sounding company names, so a simple historical Whois search might not be enough to alert you to the domain’s past usage.

That’s one of the reasons why DomainTools offers a comprehensive screenshot history with most Whois queries. Not only can you see who owned a domain name in the past, you can also very quickly check to see what it was used for.

Take the generic-sounding domain WebmasterAccess.com, for example. It could be used to host a forum for webmasters to exchange technical tips, it could be a web hosting company, or it could be used as a jobs site for designers and developers.

In fact, it’s owned by a large adult entertainment publisher and is used to promote a porn webmaster show. The site may be almost safe-for-work today, but the DomainTools screenshot history clearly shows that as recently as January this year it contained very adults-only imagery. It’s easy to see that just from the thumbnails in our archive, too – you don’t need to look at the full-sized capture if you don’t want to!

If that domain was for sale, and you were thinking about buying it to develop or resell, that’s important background info that you’d need to know.

If you’re a DomainTools customer, you already know the value of Whois for researching the history of domain names, but not everybody is as savvy.

A hoaxer this week managed to fool some of the world’s most respected news organizations into reporting that Internet Explorer users are “dumber” than users of other browsers, and it was a Whois search that eventually blew the story open.

Dozens of outlets – including CNN, the BBC and Forbes – fell for a story put out by a fake Canadian company called AptiQuant, which claimed to have proved scientifically that IE users have below-average IQs.

AptiQuant said in a press release that it had offered free online IQ tests to over 100,000 people and then correlated the scores with the browser used to take the test. IE users, it said, were found to have much lower IQ scores than everybody else.

The media rapidly picked up the meme and ran with it. Headlines such as “If You’re Reading This On Internet Explorer, You’re Probably Dumb” and “Dumb people use Internet Explorer, survey says” were among the hundreds around the world that AptiQuant’s news generated.

But the story was completely bogus, as a simple Whois search could have revealed in an instant.

After the initial wave of reports, readers started doing a bit of digging. Most of AptiQuant’s web site content, they discovered, had been copied and pasted from a French company called Central Test. Even the photographs of AptiQuant’s non-existent staff had been copied.

But here’s the kicker: Whois shows that the domain name aptiquant.com was only registered on July 14 this year. That’s in contrast to the web site itself, which had content claiming to date back to 2005.

A developer named Tarandeep Gill has now confessed to being behind the hoax. He said that he just wanted to highlight what a pain IE 6.0 can be to support when building web sites.

“We are really surprised that it took so long for people to figure it out, a mere Whois on the domain could have revealed it all,” Gill wrote.

To make things worse, some of the news sites now reporting the hoax have claimed that Gill lives in San Francisco, whereas he in fact lives near Vancouver, Canada – as the Whois record clearly shows!

It’s not just the media that could benefit from making Whois part of their standard research toolkit. Just as reporters were fooled by a hoaxer telling them what they wanted to hear, there are a lot of bad guys out there making “too good to be true” offers who have less frivolous intentions.

If you find yourself on a web site that looks a bit fishy, Whois should be your first port of call.

Introducing two of the newest members that have joined the DomainTools team within the past month….Ben and Mike!  They’e added some wonderful new energy and expertise to our office and we’re excited to have them on board.

Meet Mike (on left) and Ben (on right)

Here’s a little about them…

Ben, our SEO & Analytics manager, graduated from Iowa State University in 2006 with a BS in Management Information Systems. After graduating, he began his SEO career at space150, a digital agency based in Minneapolis. Over the course of 4 years, he handled increasingly larger SEO clients such as American Express, Discovery Channel, Dairy Queen, General Mills, Ameriprise Financial, and many others.

In 2010, Ben and his wife relocated to Seattle to explore the Northwest (and escape Minnesota winters!). For the past year,  he was the SEO Manager at Point It, a search marketing agency in the Lower Queen Anne area of Seattle. Ben worked with clients such as Microsoft, Clarisonic, Car Toys, and many others.

Ben says that he wanted to work for DomainTools because it offered the opportunity to engage his SEO and analytics expertise with a fun and passionate in-house team. He really liked DomainTools’ philosophy of hiring “fewer, better employees” and also the unique perks like ping pong and lunches twice a week. Ben also adds that thanks to his new coworkers, he’s already seen a 214.8% increase in his Foodie IQ since starting last Monday and he fully expects that trend to continue.

Mike, our newest engineer, has been working with web applications and related technologies for almost 10 years. He graduated from Montana State University with a BS in Computer Science and still has fond memories of late night coding sessions in the lab (EPS 254). Prior to joining DomainTools’ engineering team, he was with Infogears Inc., a software company based out of Bozeman Montana. Mike enjoys exploring the city in his free time, trying new eats and drinks and experiencing all that Seattle has to offer.

Mike says that he was eager to join DomainTools for many reasons, including being able to work with a talented team, solve difficult problems and, of course, the opportunity to have an impact on the products so many people rely on.

Interested in joining our team or know of someone who is interested? Good news, we still have a few positions open:

User Experience Designer

Front-end JavaScript Engineer

Back-end Python/PHP Engineer

Here is a quick Twitter or Facebook announcement that you can copy and paste to help us spread the word:

Calling all UX Designers/Engineers looking for a job w/ an exciting #Seattle company in Belltown! Check out DomainTools: http://goo.gl/RhZbU