DomainTools Blog

We are giving away Free Registrant Searches! Well, not exactly all of them, but we are giving away free reports about yourself. In response to some of critics that want to know what is available about themselves we have opened up the report system so that anyone can order a report on their own identify. If you have not used the Registrant Search system yet, it is a system that allows you to see all domains owned by a registrant. We are in the process of improving it even more and adding in features that people are requesting. This is the only system that will be able to tell people where all their domains are located. Have you ever bought a domain from Snapnames or another drop catching place and have no idea which registrar that domain ended up at. After a few months of buying domains you start to lose track of those domains, this tool now allows you to track down those domains for FREE.

We think this is just one step towards a more balanced Registrant Search tool. If people can order a report on you, then you should have the right to know what they can possibly order. Transparency should go both ways.

To access the free report there are a few steps:

1) Be at least a free member of DomainTools.com (Gold or Silver member doesn’t hurt either).
2) Add your email address which appears on your whois record into the new verification system.
3) Order a report using a verified email address as the search string.
4) Enter a payment option (Paypal or Credit Card) to get past the shopping cart; you will NOT be billed.
5)  Click purchase report for $0.00.

It is that simple. Presto, you now have a report on yourself. Feel free to order as many reports on yourself as you want. When you order a free credit report on yourself the government only allows one free report per year. We have no limits like this, you can confirm as many email addresses as you like and receive reports on all those email addresses as well.

This is an early Christmas gift to everyone.

A lot of people are asking me to take Registrant Search down. Clearly this tool has a lot of power and people are pissed that it is available. People can abuse the tool and do a lot of investigating that one can argue they shouldn’t be allowed to. So the question I have to ask myself is do I keep it up. I guess the best way to decide is to discuss it openly and see if I can form an opinion that would lead to some action that people are begging for.

I am going to allow anyone to make the case either way in the comments below for removing it or keeping it. Your comments will not be censored but should be factually based. If you can convince me to take it down and you have clear argument why, which is articulated well you may very well convince me to make a change or take it down completely. Here is one of the many comments I received on my blog about it.

Comment from my blog that started this post:

I don’t know if you realize Jay, but your new tool (that tell who owns how many domains) is a major threat to many people’s personal safety from crooks. It is very depressing that someone can get that kind of info about every domainer. Please take a moment to think about the potential devastating impact of such tool or innocent domainers. Why do the entire world need to know which domainer has how many domains. Its no one’s business in my opinion. Your tool may perhaps even be illegal as it invades privacy of people.

Please take it down……its not worth it if because of your tool some domainer or his family is exposed to threats.

I hope you care about the domainer community and just do the right thing.

So should I take it down or keep it? I will post the best argument on both sides and make a call on it. If you don’t like the tool, supply your best argument or forever hold your peace.

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.

We are currently limiting search reports to 10,000 unique domains at a time. For the average person, 10,000 results should be more then plenty. We suggest people search using multiple words to narrow down the query to just one individual target. A report for “Bob” would result in 225,432 domains, but a search for “Bob Saget” would result in 10 domain names. There may be multiple people with a name so by throwing in strings that are cities or zipcodes you can narrow a search to a particular person quickly.

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!