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.

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.

Here is a video of Fox News talking about Buying and Selling domain names. The two reporters seem like they don’t understand domain names but they sure have a lot to say about them. One lady keeps talking about typing domain names into Google. They say there are 90,000 domain names purchased everyday. Hmmm, They didn’t quote their source but it is wrong. Perhaps half that amount or around 45,000 would be more accurate. They seem to think most domains go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Reporters like these cause bubbles. I don’t want to bash them too much, they are doing a good thing for the Industry but they need to keep things in perspective as well. There is a market for Generic domains that is very healthy. Certain domains are worth millions other domains are worth $6. Crappy domains have no market and never will. They got it right though, there is a lot of money behind dotcom. Everybody knows that brand of website.