HOWTO: Find # of WHOIS searches performed on your domains (GoDaddy)

[Nathan King]

That plus the Premium Name feature instantly availaible for registration are 2 powerful reasons I am thinking about moving more domains to GD.

Those are the two reasons that keep me at GoDaddy. Not a big fan of their clunky bloated interface, or their sometimes buggy software (especially the auction platform), but the pros outweigh the cons IMO. Hell, premium listings alone are enough to keep me there. $7.69 for .com renewals isn't bad either.

 

[Bill Roy]

Just did a check. Two very surprising results found. I think this is a brilliant tool.

 

[Nathan King]

I have a domain that I know nobody did a WHOIS search for (long and very random letters), but yet GoDaddy is showing 2 WHOIS requests for it (it's about to expire). There is a noticeable increase in WHOIS requests on domains that are about to expire, so I'm assuming those 2 requests were made by automated tools that people are running. Not sure how they are getting around GoDaddy's CAPTCHAs, but it seems to be the case. Something to keep in mind.

 

[David G]

As far as I know a bot can not read a Captcha. Plus I believe the Godaddy captcha design is one of the stronger ones what with all the background black lines.

 

[Together]

I have a domain that I know nobody did a WHOIS search for (long and very random letters), but yet GoDaddy is showing 2 WHOIS requests for it (it's about to expire). There is a noticeable increase in WHOIS requests on domains that are about to expire, so I'm assuming those 2 requests were made by automated tools that people are running. Not sure how they are getting around GoDaddy's CAPTCHAs, but it seems to be the case. Something to keep in mind.

There are always ways to get around captchas and any other "security mechanism that these sites put in place. As a matter of fact I know at least one person who has commented in this thread who is actively running data mining scripts to check on this and other types of info. The big boys have been using methods like this for over a decade although most people will never know about it because they don't mention this in public.

 

[Bill F.]

I too have noticed that the queries spike around the expiration date. If these were all done by hand, I'd be making sales like crazy. It's something to watch for, as I started looking at this to help me decide which names to renew or drop, and it can be cause for false optimism.

 

[jaydub]

Just "refresh" bumping this up as it can be a helpful tool and some may have missed the post.