today's Wash Post Business section

Thu Dec 21 11:15:20 UTC 2006

Hello;

On Dec 20, 2006, at 11:20 PM, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

>
> On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:48:06 -0500
> Edward Lewis <Ed.Lewis at neustar.biz> wrote:
>
>>
>> Yeah, granted anyone looking for myspace might meet that demographic,
>> but how many neophytes would use Google for a "IP Who Is" "search"?
>> That's the listing I thought odd.
>>
>
> Maybe it's a script written and run by someone semi-clueful -- or too
> clueful to use a real whois server, which might notice the attempt to
> enumerate the space.  Google undoubtedly knows in some sense but
> doesn't care.

Or, maybe it is just people looking for ip whois servers, since all  
of the returns "above the fold" for "ip who is" are
to entities (ARIN, RIPE, etc) running whois servers (directly or as a  
pass through).

Remember, this is a feedback system. If the people running the  
searches didn't ever click on ARIN, it wouldn't be kept at the
top of the list for this query. And I found that googling "ip who is  
<ip address>" rarely returned anything useful.

So I would conclude that there are a fair number of people using ip  
whois and using google to find servers, which is not that surprising.

Regards
Marshall

>
> 		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb