Whats your goto whois site?

birchbeer

@pullangcubo said:
This is something that boggled me for so long but never really tried finding out the reason for: why do some whois sites show more information than others? Is it a matter of "privileges" with the whois database or is it merely due to webmaster's preference?

For example:
https://www.internic.net/whois.html
vs
https://www.whois.com/whois/lowendtalk.com

In connection to that: which whois site shows the most exhaustive (possible) details for a domain name?

It's because of how the whois request is being implemented. Whois is a very simplistic protocol and depending on the client implementation - the output could contain additional information.

In your example, the folks at whois.com has implemented whois requests on the registrar information and also the NIC handles in addition to the actual domain name request.

Most of the examples here are not really whois servers - and if they are - they are probably thin servers. Most are simply implementations of whois clients.

@mailinabox said:
Gimme the source code?

No source code needed. The protocol is super simplistic. If you really just want to do cli queries without a client - you can just telnet to the correct thick server whois service serving the tld and query it directly. For example,

telnet whois.verisign-grs.com 43
lowendtalk.com

or

echo lowendtalk.com | nc whois.verisign-grs.com 43

That would be to query .com domains thick server.

armandorg

We have a custom Who-is, ofcourse powered by a third-party.