DomainTools Blog

As most are aware, today, Wednesday, January 18th, thousands of websites went dark to protest SOPA & PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and (Protect IP Act) similar to sites like Wired.com, as seen in the image.

DomainTools provisioned its historic thumbnailing service on a new site called Screenshots.com, as announced in December.  Today, we customized that service to capture the homepages of websites that are protesting SOPA & PIPA so you can see how their content and message has changed in light of the protest.

To memorialize this historic event in Internet history, we also created a specific page to feature and archive a sampling of many of the sites as they existed today.

If you would like to learn more, here are a few good sources regarding the acts and protest:

• SOPAstrike.com and AmericanCensorship.org
• Matt Cutts, Google’s software engineer that heads the Web Spam Team, covers SOPA well on his blog. If you check out the blog, you’ll find links to Google’s statement and a link to sign the petition.

It should be noted that a number of companies in the domain space have joined the fight, including our friends at Tucows and NameCheap.

If you visit Screenshots.com, you can queue other sites for screen capture by using the link on the right side of the search results page.  If we do not yet have any screenshots for your site, by searching for the site on Screenshots.com you have automatically queued it for capture.

It’s been over a week since we launched Screenshots.com on December 6th. We’re excited to have this live for all of you to use. To those who have sent us feedback on the site, thank you!

Please feel free to continue sharing your thoughts with us regarding the site functionality or anything else that comes to mind. You can share feedback by commenting on this blog or send us an email via Support(at)Screenshots(dot)com. You can also feel free to post messages via Twitter or comment on our Screenshots.com Facebook page wall.

With that said, we’ve started posting a screenshot a day on our Screenshots Facebook page.

Every day, we post a newly updated screenshot from our archive. It’s a great way to gain insight into websites that you may not be aware of (or ones that you have been aware of but haven’t visited recently!).

Be sure to friend us on Facebook to receive these daily Screenshot updates in your Facebook news feed!