A lot of web site / domain name owners like to stay private with putting whois privacy on the domain name information provided in whois and it can make it a big challenge if you are trying to find out who is behind a specific site. Yesterday I was playing around and trying to find out who owned a specific site but whois privacy was applied. I often use DomainTools.com whois history, but it was a new registration and no whois records were in place so it didn’t work. Many times, even with whois history records on a domain name, they can all be private as well or you can not tell if the domain changed ownership in between time of records displayed.

The site was very basic and didn’t provide any added info that could assist me in find out who was behind the site, directly on the site. This got me thinking… it is hard to cover ALL tracks, so there has to be a way for me to find out who owns the site. So I viewed the source code of the site to see if that could assist me at all and I found the site owner was using Google Adsense. Since Google adsense provides its users with a "pub" ID, they are always the same for that user and most people use the same pub id on each site they use Google Adsense on.

I copied the pub id number and Googled it to see what would showed up.

Only one return and it was ServerSiders.com returning some info on a different domain name, using the same pub id. Sweet! Who would of thought that a service is available that tracks pub id’s! ServerSiders.com is a cool little tool that provides a fair amount of mainly public data and sometimes even returns matching results to a Google Adsense pub id. Since the pub id was matched and used on a couple other sites by this same person, it gave me more options and more domain names to find out who was behind the site. It worked!

ServerSiders.com is a free tool and you simply add /domainname.com in the URL to see the data provided for the specific domain name you would like info on. I can see this free tool as an added assistance in your investigation from to time so I wanted to make you aware of it. Secondly, if you have never thought about searching for a site owner using their pub id if they are using Google Adsense, you are now aware of that. Yesterday was the first time I even thought of using that number.

Server Siders provides a great deal of info, so the best thing to do if you are interested in it, is to check it out! A lot of little options as well, like to see the top 1,000 "alexa ranked" .com domain names using Adsense. You can also see the top 1,000 alexa ranked global sites. btw, the top site is a .net (csdn.net) but the remaining top 10 are .com’s.

Keep in mind this is a tool, so it is not 100% perfect. An example of it not being perfect, it showed 2 sites of mine that I use Google Adsense on, but I use 4 sites. In server sides defense, the other two are newer sites.

Once I discovered ServerSiders.com, I also happened to notice another cool little tool they have which is SimilarURLS.com . The site offers what the domain name states, similar sites to the one you enter.

I think this tool could be useful when you are doing research for building a new web site or if you are looking for a "tool" and know one site that offers it already. If similar sites are in the database on SimilarURLS.com, it will likely show you relevant results to similar sites to the one you already know, which can provide you with options.

To use the tool, it works exactly the same way ServerSiders.com does. Just add the domain name after to look like this: http://similarurls.com/moniker.com As long as the system has data, they will show you similar sites to the one you entered.

Both are pretty cool little tools and can be useful depending on your needs. They are both free, which is also cool, so check them out when you have a chance and let me know what you think.