today's Wash Post Business section

Thu Dec 21 03:31:22 UTC 2006

Many people don't understand anything about how they access the 
Internet, they have a vague idea that they need to type a domain name 
into a box somewhere... so they type www.myspace.com into the Google 
search box, the result set pops up, and then they click on the first 
result to get to the web site in question... I've seen it more than once.

Thomas

Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
> 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
>
>
>   