Just a quick note that we released some new updates to the DomainTools mobile site! Here's what's NEW: -Breadcrumb navigation. This allows users to keep track of their locations while navigating through the site more easily. -Simplified search box. You will be able to do a Whois search from any page! You will see a 'search' link at the top rig...

A few weeks ago, we posted an article where were able to take a deep dive into our data, looking closely at the presence of unique domain names across TLDs. At the same time, we also looked at domain names based on the number of TLDs they exist in. Below is an infographic of the top 20 most popular ?left of the dot? domain names, based on the data...

Like any site with lots of data, DomainTools gets its share of spam accounts, scrape attacks, and other abusive efforts to harvest data. Historically we have been somewhat tolerant of any efforts that we felt didn't leak valuable data and didn't affect the ability of our site to service our paying members and clients. We try to keep our Engineer...

One of the benefits of having access to the most comprehensive database of domain data available is the ability to conduct insightful analytics, such as the Verisign dark domains post from a few months ago. Here is another view in what we hope to be an ongoing series of data-driven posts. Is .COM Truly ?King?? When talking about .com domains, ?.co...

Ever wanted to build a cool Whois app, or augment your domain name or DNS site with DomainTools' data? Now you can, for free! With our new Developer API Access, you can get 500 Domain Profile and Whois lookups every month at no cost. That's plenty to build a proof-of-concept or even to augment lookups on a small-scale site or app. Wouldn't your p...

Verisign's New Disclosures Still Leave Some Questions Unanswered We?re pleased to see that Verisign is now disclosing?'not configured domain names' in their daily zone count. By Verisign?s definition, ?not configured domain names? are: domain name registrations that are not configured with name servers at the Top-level Domain (TLD) registry, and th...

Great news for those of you who have been asking about a DomainTools Android app ? it's now available in the Google Play store! Let us know what you think about it, as we'd love to know what you like or how we can improve on it. Comment on this blog or email is at MemberServices (at) DomainTools (dot) com.

It's easy to be critical of ICANN, but for me it is also easy to defend the organization and the ideals that founded it and continue to fuel its decisions. I?m relatively new to the community, but after 4 consecutive meetings I?m still continually amazed at how the multistakeholder model brings together academics, politicians, engineers, end-users,...

It's time again for another volume of the 'Best of DomainTools Support'. We had some goodies come in over the past few months. For those of you who are newly discovering these 'Best of DomainTools Support' posts, here is some background: DomainTools Support receives a wide variety of inquiries ? from appropriate account-related questions to inqui...

Exciting news! We now have an API for Screenshots.com, and at least for now, it's completely free. We're letting anyone in the world use it (within reason!), and we're giving away both small and large screenshots plus the complete historical record for a domain. You can learn more about access, api documentation and the terms of service at Screens...

We just launched a new mobile Whois product on our live DomainTools.com site! What this means: It's a complete re-design and rebuild of the Whois Lookup product you've come to rely on. And, it's specifically for mobile devices.

There's been a lot of buzz last week about Face.com being acquired by Facebook. To find out more about the historical aspect of Face.com, there are a lot of research tools you can leverage via DomainTools to piece together a full story: 1. What's the Whois History of Face.com...how many record changes have there been over the years and what are t...

DomainTools was recently featured in the World Intellectual Property Review‘s 2012 edition. In case you're not familiar with?the WIPR Annual: it is a reference guide for IP owners, legal counsel, investors and service providers. It examines the business and legal issues affecting IP, highlighting recent developments, problem area and, most im...

We're back from The INTA's Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.! It was really great to meet face to face with current DomainTools members who often approached our booth with, "Hey, we use you guys all the time!". We learned about which tools our members use most heavily, and received excellent feedback regarding what might be most helpful to prote...

For the second year in a row, DomainTools will be exhibiting at The International Trademark Association (INTA)'s annual meeting,?May 5-9th in Washington, D.C. Read more details about DomainTools' exhibition this year and how we serve this market in our press release. If you will be attending the INTA conference and would like to set up...

Happy Friday! It's the perfect day to showcase the next volume in our 'Best of DomainTools Support' series. This little gem showed up a few day ago in an envelope. Support tickets and inquiries are queued via email to our support team, so this is pretty rare! We've never had a catalog request until now. It would make it *much* more difficult to se...

Finally! No more tedious zooming, pinching, squinting or scrolling to see who owns a domain name, browse Whois history, or search domains to buy in the new DomainTools Marketplace. Starting today, anyone who visits DomainTools.com from their Android or iOS device (plus a few others) will see a mobile-optimized layout that provides nearly all the fu...

Today we release a preview of a very important and distinct product for DomainTools: the DomainTools Marketplace. It offers an integrated experience to discover domains to buy or register with a clean interface, easy-to-use filters, and a super-fast search engine. As the leading provider of Whois data worldwide, DomainTools gets an enormous amount ...

An exciting Press Release went out this morning about Escrow.com's use of our API services. Check out the full release below: Escrow.com Partners with DomainTools to Reinforce Transaction Security and Elevate Customer Experience DomainTools? API suite allows Escrow.com to automate their verification processes while providing faster, more secure r...

We are pleased to announce that Cindy joined the DomainTools team this Wednesday as our Senior Graphic Designer - you may have seen our Facebook update that included a link to her DomainTools employee profile on our website. She's already hitting the ground running, working on anything that needs some DomainTools-esque design or UI magic added to ...

I've previously described how Screenshots.com can be an incredibly useful tool for researching a domain name before you decide whether to buy it, but I sometimes find it's just great fun too. With an archive of screen captures dating back seven years or more for many popular sites, it can be fascinating to dive back into the history of the web a...

As you may know from some of our previous "Best of Support" posts, DomainTools Support receives a wide variety of inquiries via our online support portal. Some of the inquiries are appropriate membership-related questions and other inquiries are not related to DomainTools at all. With that said, we recently had a package delivered to DomainTools t...

We are happy to welcome Steve as the newest member of the DomainTools team! Steve recently relocated from the bay area, although he used to live and work in Seattle for Amazon Fresh. He brings some strong technical skills to our team so we are thrilled to have him on board. Read more about Steve and our other DomainTools team members on our About...

A number of organizations track the .com domain registrations without taking into consideration the complete picture, thus underestimating the current count. Our research shows that the .com count is already well past that number. Verisign publishes a daily ?zone file? of registered .com domain names with their associated nameservers. Yesterday t...

As you are aware, today, Wednesday, January 18th, thousands of websites will go dark to protest SOPA & PIPA (Stop Online Privacy Act) and (Protect IP Act). By combining DomainTools' extensive WHOIS database with website screenshots, we are able to produce a rich visual view into the homepages of websites that are protesting SOPA & PIPA s...

The time has come to draw a name out of our Reverse Whois contest entries. And the winner is…Paul Goldstone! His entry read, "Dear Santa, please send me a free reverse lookup report. There's a cookie in it for you!" Congratulations, Paul! Honorable mentions go to the following contestants who submitted some great entries: ****#1...

It's been over a week since we launched Screenshots.com on December 6th. We're excited to have this live for all of you to use. Thank you to those who have sent us feedback on the site! Please feel free to continue sharing your thoughts with us regarding the site functionality or anything else that comes to mind. You can share feedback by commenti...

Today marks the launch of Screenshots.com, a new DomainTools site that provides an excellent showcase for the millions of historical website thumbnails we've collected over the years. It's also typical of the kinds of engineering problems that seem relatively straightforward until you try them on web-scale. Most of us know that browsing the web w...

It's that fun time of year to start another give away! We've been working with Santa to provide a FREE Reverse Whois Report to one lucky DomainTools fan… Find out all the details by visiting?Santa's Favorite Whois site. P.S. You have until January 1st, 2012 ?to enter the give away by contacting [email protected] about your...

With the news not too long ago that Republican Jack Abramoff is fighting to get control of jackabramoff.com from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, I thought I'd take a look at the always tricky subject of domain names used in politics.

Yes, you read the headline right. We had a baby shower celebration this Thursday at DomainTools in honor of Jason and his wife Erika - welcoming their baby girl in just a few weeks! We ate some ice cream cake and played a baby-themed game that was an interesting mix of trivia, pictionary and charades! Gustavo impressed us all with his charade skil...

In case you haven't heard about our Halloween pumpkin carving contest last week, we wanted to share some fun photos of the event. We had a great time teaming up to compete for bragging rights (the 2 BEST DomainTools Halloween pumpkins of 2011)?topped off with Halloween cake and a birthday toast to Brian, our office

We found out the answer to that question the other day, having gained access to Google Analytics Real-Time. It was amazing to see the number of site visitors flicker from moment to moment. Ah, the moment we have been waiting for finally ?came true- here's the evidence! Yesterday, here was a snapshot of how many

There is no doubt that word has spread across the globe about the passing of Apple's visionary leader, Steve Jobs. At DomainTools, we fully acknowledge his impact on the industry and we read about the news online just as it broke. It's a clear indicator of how quickly news spreads via the Internet. To honor Steve, we wanted to share these images f...

To celebrate September birthdays at DomainTools (Susan, Emily, Andrew and Kirsten), we played some mini golf at the Interbay Golf Course in Seattle the other day. After grabbing some beverages, teams were chosen by the birthday crew. It was a perfect day to play some mini put-put out in the sun! Prizes were given out to the topo 2 teams, includin...

Here at DomainTools we're well-aware of the importance companies place on protecting their brands online, especially when it comes to using our tools to hunt down cybersquatting and typosquatting. But typosquatting is not just a problem for brand managers any more, as recent shocking research has shown. A security company called Godai recently man...

It's been months since we posted our first DomainTools Support Inquiry blog update (January) and it's time to post a Volume 2! In case you don't remember the background around these tickets, here's a recap: DomainTools Support receives a wide variety of inquiries ? from appropriate account-related questions to inquiries that are not so much relat...

Last week, I explained how simple it can be to gain insight into companies' product plans by using DomainTools to track the domain names they register. If you've been using our services to do that for a long time, you'll have no doubt noticed that every company has a different strategy, in terms of how, and more importantly when, they register doma...

At DomainTools, we often throw around ideas on new and interesting data we could collect and combine with our existing data sets to discover interesting information. One idea that had been floating around was to look up and store mail server (MX) records for all domain names we know of in the popular top level domains (TLDs). This would enable us ...

Have you ever read a story on news site or blog about how a well-known company is planning a new product or service, which is based on the domain names it has recently registered? Have you ever wondered how the writer came across their information? Last week, TechCrunch spotted that Google had become the proud owner of Android.me, for example. Gam...

With the launch of .xxx domain names coming soon, I thought now would be a good time to address an important topic sometimes overlooked by domain buyers: how to avoid accidentally purchasing a domain that was once used for pornography. Almost as long as the web has been around, companies have been selling content filtering software. Parents and ne...

If you're a DomainTools customer, you already know the value of Whois for researching the history of domain names, but not everybody is as savvy. A hoaxer this week managed to fool some of the world's most respected news organizations into reporting that Internet Explorer users are "dumber" than users of other browsers, and it was a Whois search t...

We are happy to introduce you to two of the newest members that have joined the DomainTools team within the past month. They'e added some wonderful new energy and expertise to our office and we're excited to have them on board. Welcome, Mike and Ben! Ben, our SEO & Analytics manager, graduated from Iowa State University in 2006 with a BS in ...

Have you ever thought about how many hundreds of thousands of people are sharing pictures with each other now that Apple (and others) have given them a device to make it crazy-simple? Sure, us geeks have had that sorted for a while, just like us in the domain space know exactly what it means when DomainControl.com loses 58,746 names in a day (okay,...

Did you know the first product DomainTools sold was an API? We built an innovative domain suggestion engine called Name Spinner that was ?and still is?popular with registrars, likely driven to some extent by the crowded .com space. For those of you who are not registrars, innovative tools such as Domain Suggestions (called Name Spinner) and Domain...

Time to announce our DomainTools binoculars contest winners!!! Chosen at random by our lovely employees Kirsten, Tim P. and Brian, the winners of the Domain Monitoring Tool contest (aka DomainTools Binoculars giveaway) are: Batfan, Sara Freixa and WebsiteToSell.com ? Congratulations! To claim your new binoculars, please email monica@domaintools...

You've probably noticed that in our conference pictures, cute little red DomainTools binoculars keep popping up - we started giving these away at a few of the conferences we've attended this year, including Domain Rountable, INTA and SMX Advanced - Search Marketing Expo. The response from exhibitors and attendees has been incredibly positive and en...

We just wrapped up our with SMX Advanced in Seattle this Tuesday and Wednesday. If you missed the press release about our attendance, be sure to read it. It was our first time at a search marketing conference, and it was interesting to introduce DomainTools to curious attendees who wanted more in-depth details about all of our services. Those conve...

This week, we are happy to introduce you to two of the newest members that have joined the DomainTools team! They'e added some wonderful new energy and expertise to our office and we're excite to have them on board. Welcome Kirsten and Jason! Kirsten is a native of the Seattle area and a UW grad, and actually lives on the same street as her pare...