Help me identify all registered domain names containing the string fortruth.

October 24, 2004 11:16 AM

Is there a way to get a plain text file with all currently registered domain names? Also, is there a way to use whois (from the command line or via a web site) to do partial searches (e.g. whois meta*.com) for large searches (whois seems to cut off after 20 search results)? (domainsurfer.com can do this but their db hasn't been updated for 2 years)

Kind of inspired by wanting to find all of "*fortruth.*" because of this comment.

posted by gwint to computers & internet (6 comments total)

The whois interface does not have a standard way to pass in regular expressions.
posted by plinth at 11:31 AM on October 24, 2004

www.whois.sc - wildcard domain name search.
posted by adrianhon at 11:36 AM on October 24, 2004

Another problem is lack of standardization across registrars. Ben Edelman occasionally has interesting articles related to whois research. You do of course realize how massive even a plain text file would be, right?
posted by anathema at 11:39 AM on October 24, 2004

Netcraft.
posted by Gyan at 1:02 PM on October 24, 2004

whois.sc rocks but only does com/net/org/info/biz/us wildcards. No country tlds (apart from .us). However, it does two other great things that might not be useful to you but are pretty unique: wildcard searching which includes expired / historical domains, and a kind of reverse IP lookup. Plus it keeps whois history for the last two years.

namedroppers is a pretty speedy wildcard search - but it's only com/net/org/edu.

netcraft indexes more than whois.sc but I'm never been entirely sure of its range or comprehensiveness or timeliness (for instance, a domain I registered last week appeared in whois.sc the day after; it's not in netcraft at all yet). Plus, netcraft don't give links to the whois, just the site itself.

As a comparison, for domains containing metafilter:
Whois.sc: six (metafilter.com / net / org / info - all of which mirror mefi.com and are registered to #1, apart from .info (Rogers Cadenhead from Illinois)), plus metafilter-filter.com (dead) and wwwmetafilter.com (which redirects to Sporebank, who appear to sell, well - spores.
Netcraft: five - they don't get metafilter-filter.com.

There are tools out there - like Mozzle, for instance - which will do live lookups of just about every TLD for a term. However, they don't do wildcard searches. I came across another wildcard domain search last week and now I can't remember it... I'll post it here if I think of it.

Incidentally, coolwhois.com is fast and can lookup almost everything (with a handy bookmarklet) but com/net/org lookups are often impossible because it gets banned from the netsol server very regularly. It doesn't do wildcard lookups but if you want to know an obscure TLD, it's a good first start.

If you ever get really stuck on a country TLD, go to IANA's central list here and find the relevant TLD and then their central registry.
posted by humuhumu at 1:40 PM on October 24, 2004

Btw, it seems most useful to search for:
sfortruth
to get the groups.
posted by davebug at 12:30 PM on October 25, 2004