I guess ICANN's lookup tool (https://lookup.icann.org/) is probably more trustworthy than commercially operated ones; it would be a terrible look for them to engage in this practice.
But I always feel much safer using whois in a terminal than any website that can see what I'm searching for.
I also wanted say "consider whois", but with a few more caveats. First, obviously the whois server you use matters. There is nothing magical about whois that stops GoDaddy from doing the same thing if you query whois.godaddy.com, you still need to talk to someone less likely to engage in this like going directly to InterNIC's, whois.internic.net (still I think under the US DOC, which whatever other flaws it has isn't really scrounging for change there).
>But I always feel much safer using whois in a terminal
Also as a minor FWIW, there are plenty of simple GUI's (often built-in) on whois as well so someone can just use one of those if they prefer. macOS for example still has some of the old useful utilities included for free including in this case Network Utility, though for whatever reason Apple moved them out of /Applications/Utilities and into /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications (that's also where a pile of other useful ones went).
> It's included with macOS, Windows, Linux or any other OS anyone's likely to use.
Is it? I don't think it is included on Windows --- it is available on sysinternal, sure, but not included. (Unless something has changed from when I stopped using Windows)
I’ve started using rdap first for this kind of thing partly because it works in browser and also because corporate firewalls like to block whois. Having a standardised response format is also really nice.
> As a PSA to everyone, you should only ever use whois in a terminal window to see if a domain is available.
A month or so ago, I discovered .wang was a TLD, and I immediately brought it up with friends, and we spent some time happily and goofily brainstorming. I'm not sure about the exact count, but after dozens of queries, whois started returning errors for too many requests.
that's not the whois software or the whois protocol returning that, it's the configuration of the particular nameserver you're talking to; whois software/protocol allows you to specify different nameservers, so you could switch
A who is server and a domain name server are two different things. But back to the topic: who is servers in most cases have some kind of limit per a certain time frame so you don't abuse them.
I thought I saw a complaint about them domain frontrunning once, but it surprised me and I didn't see any hard evidence, and it doesn't seem like them.
But I'll still always feel safer using whois in the terminal. I've been online too long to trust anyone on matters like this.
Besides, whois is right here in my terminal, so it's quicker anyway.
Yes, namecheap is also sketchy had some trouble when I tried to renew a domain I bought with them then I tried to transfer it to Google domains to only have it blocked
As a PSA to everyone, you should only ever use whois in a terminal window to see if a domain is available.
It's included with macOS, Windows (?), Linux or any other OS anyone's likely to use. [Edit: a reply says it's not included in Windows. It seems you can download it free here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/whoi...]
I guess ICANN's lookup tool (https://lookup.icann.org/) is probably more trustworthy than commercially operated ones; it would be a terrible look for them to engage in this practice.
But I always feel much safer using whois in a terminal than any website that can see what I'm searching for.