Accurate Whois

[RedBar]

The Whois I have used for years is not giving me accurate information. I checked up on a domain I bought 22 years ago and it said it had never been registered before, its current owner has had it for sale for probably 11/12 years.

I decided to use this [lookup.icann.org...] however it doesn't give any historical details.

Any ideas, thanks?

[lammert]

I have seen this happening with domains which expired and released and were only later picked up by a new owner. Once a domain goes through the full suspension/redemption/delete cycle, it seems to lose the history.

[robzilla]

If at any point a domain is available for registration, the Created date will be the last date of registration. The registry doesn't keep (public) tabs on a domain's registrations; some WHOIS services do, but it's not a part of the data returned by a lookup.

[jmccormac]

Some of the more recent entrants into the whois history market don't have records that far back. There were only a few services (DT and, I think, LexisNexis) doing checking then. There was a whowas service proposed a few years ago by Verisign but nothing happened with it. I'd probably have hosting history on the domain name back to around 2000.

When a domain name in a gTLD is deleted (goes through the full lifecycle), the previous registration data is deleted and the new registration begins with the timestamp for the new registration.

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

Thanks jmcc ... Therefore the old bad history Google used to call on is no longer applicable, it starts with a "clean slate"?

That's a pity really, I'd always considered a domain like a house with an extended history to look back at.

[lammert]

Some older houses have cracks in their foundations. If a domain was used in shady tactics in the past, the value may not be that great.

[jmccormac]

It is a tricky question, RedBar,
Google may keep its own records on a domain name's history or use. There have been reports of domain names with bad histories being blacklisted for Adsense. Inherited links (where a reregistered domain name appears to take on the inbound links of the old website) has been a problem for search engines. One solution was to watch the daily deletions. The problem with that approach was when the big registrars started to auction off the expired domain names before the domain names dropped. That really screwed things up for the deletion/registration date being accurate. The Wayback Machine ( archive.org) may also help if there was a presence on the domain name back to about 1996. That is, at least, verifiable as it provides the timestamps for when the site was crawled for inclusion.

There is another problem with storing data on domain names. There are more deleted domain names (hundreds of millions more) than there are active domain names. Even the .COM is running around 52% to 57%. During the era of large-scale Domain Tasting (2005-2009), tens of millions of domain names were being registered and deleted in some months. Some of the companies tracking on a daily basis just couldn't keep up with the cost of harddrives and processing of the daily changes began to lag. More than a few gave up completely. Other companies tried to get in on the stored whois business but most of them were recent additions. The stupidly designed GDPR (the product of 16th century minds trying to legislate for a 21st century problem) really screwed things up as many registrars no longer serve whois data or have obscured most of what they used to serve since May 2018.

Regards...jmcc