today's Wash Post Business section

Wed Dec 20 13:22:03 UTC 2006

Edward Lewis <Ed.Lewis at neustar.biz> writes:

> The #10 google search in the "Who Is" category (leading off with
> Borat, Hezbollah, EU, hot, ...) is "IP Who Is".
>
> I'm not sure what to make of that.  Has google replaced the whois client?

Well, the article talks about people using "myspace" as a search term,
when their goal is apparently to get to a web site.  This seems to be
a case of the same thing.

I just tried a few variants of search to get whois data for a block
that's assigned but not been used publicly (so as to avoid mail header
hits etc) out of Google - no dice.

If you search (literally) for "ip who is", though, the top hit is for
the ARIN web-based whois, the second is for someone I'm not familiar
with, the third for RIPE, the 7th for APNIC, etc.

ARIN employee lurkers on the list would be better suited to giving us
the stats, but my impression has been that the great unwashed masses
have used the web forms in preference to the command line client for
years now.

                                        ---Rob