I was trying to figure out why the search terms "Who is" and "Whois Lookup" were in Google Trends top 100 earlier today. It’s pretty rare to see exact domain related searches that pertain to just the domain industry.
So while doing my research into why all these people may be searching for whois, I finally found out why. The BBC News published an article about "fake UK sites" and .co.uk domain names and how they are being used by companies that are "no located in the UK".
Near the end of the article, Nominet which is the registry for .co.uk domains suggested to check whois and the location of the owner of the domain name.
This article has made the search for Who is and Whois lookup (even though there was a link) to have people search for those terms.
Now some registries have much higher standards then many other TLD’s but I have often said that whois is really "who do you want to be"! This can also include not only who do you want to be, but where do you want to live!
The basics, for most domain names, the owner can put what ever information they wish for the whois information. In the end, it’s likely that a lot of the information you see via Whois is either out of date or can hold false info.
The majority of whois info is Valid and Up To Date, but simply doing a whois search does not mean the info is "correct". It is always best to call the phone number provided, use the email address on file. When using the email address, send an email that you will get a reply. Once you get a reply, use "Properties" and look for the IP address where the email came from. Using Ip2Location.com (on right of site), you can see where the location is that the email came from.
The IP can often help to let you know where the email came from, so if the email comes from the same State/Country and matches what’s in Whois, it is much more likely that the whois is correct.
I had wrote in early 2008 about whois and who do you want to be and I still think it would be a good idea to put a better verification system in place so more whois information is valid and not easily changed by the registrant for specific domains.
shane
I’m the last person in the world who should be correcting grammatical errors but at the bottom of you page it says “DotWeekly.com Domain Name Blog is wrote by Professional domain name investor Jamie Zoch.” and in this article you write “I had wrote in early 2008″. I’m not sure if it is pure chance or you’re struggling with the tenses of write but I just had to point out the errors. Again, I am a challenged writer but I figured you would at least want to fix the bottom one because it is your introduction to new readers