Comments on: How do I discover all of the domain names registered to a given party?

Question: How do I discover all of the domain names registered to a given party?

NinjaPirate — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 04:51:01 -0800

How do I discover all of the domain names registered to a given party? Not "who owns this domain?" but "what domains does this party own?"

Recently the MD of our company discovered that a domain name very closely related to our own was registered by a direct competitor and pointed at their site. What I'd like to know is whether there is a method of finding out what other underhanded domains have been registered by this competitor.
The MD suspects very strongly that this is not be the only misleading domain registered by the specific competition and I would like to save some legwork checking a couple of hundred variations.

Online tools, shell scripts, code snippets - do you have a solution?

By: anathema

anathema — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 05:41:04 -0800

Netcraft has a search that will allow you to search for domains that contain your mark as part of the name. Not exactly what you are looking for.

Dialog (a Thompson company) has the capability to conduct a search of domain name registrations using the owner/admin name. Dialog will allow you to search any and/or all fields of a whois record. I believe Lexis/Nexis has a similar capability.

Also check Name.com for their reverse whois subscription service and whois.sc where you may be able to use an IP address to identify other domains hosted on the same server.

Generally, these services are not free.

One thing to keep in mind is that (assuming you are dealing with squatters) it is likely that they have used false info in some, if not all, of their registrations. This would of course lessen the utility of using the above tools. Assuming that you are thinking of filing a UDRP, in some cases a trademark owner can get a registrar to transfer a domain name if the current registrant has used patently false whois information, without filing the UDRP. Check individual registrars and the UDRP itself. YMMV, as is the case with all things relating to domain names.

You may also want to check out some of the work done by Ben Edelman at Harvard who has done a lot of work in this area.

By: thanotopsis

thanotopsis — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 06:23:00 -0800

Whois.sc is a pay-for service, but will let you get the first few (I think it goes up to 5) hits for free on any given search.

By: NinjaPirate

NinjaPirate — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 01:36:59 -0800

Thanks guys, I'll have a look into some of that.