Have you ever wondered who owns a certain website or domain name?
Have you ever wanted to know who the person is with a certain IP address that keeps leaving messages on your blog?
Well, there are ways to easily find out by doing a Whois Seach (pronounced “who is”).
The WHOIS system originated as a method that system administrators could use to look up information to contact other IP address or domain name administrators (almost like a “white pages”) according to Wikipedia.
On a forum I used to run, we had access to each persons IP address in real time through a control panel interface. We even knew which pages they were viewing and who they were sending private message to…in these cases, we are like the proverbial Big Brother watching to see what’s going on.
Rather than just being intrusive though, Whois Information can be very useful to -
- determine the availability of domain names,
- assist the security and stability of the Internet,
- investige crimes and enforcing national and international laws,
- combat illegal acts, violence, abuse, child pornography, drug rings, slave trading etc,
- assist with trademark and intellectual property enquiries and infringement,
- identify persons or entities responsible for content and services online.
So now YOU too can use the very useful link below and find out the owner of any domain you want along with their list of keywords, the percentage of relevant content and how well they have optimized their site for Search Engines!
While you’re at it, you might even want to chack out the details for YOUR OWN website.
