I have a theory — that domain registrars share your search queries with resellers. Countless times I’ve had the bad experience of searching for a domain to see its availability then finding out a day/a few days later that it has been bought or made premium. Sure, it’s very possible that it may have been legitly purchased by someone else. But I’ve been in a couple forums where people have complained about the same thing. Also, sometimes the registrar you searched at tells you it has been bought or you have to pay a premium for it but another registrar which you haven’t searched with tells you it’s available and you’re actually able to buy it.

You can boycott registrars by doing a WHOIS lookup on the desired domain instead. If a match is found, info about the domain is displayed but if no match is found, you know the site is available. There are a couple of websites that provide this functionality, most notably https://www.whois.com. Alternatively, you can use the WHOIS CLI tool.

To install, run…

$ sudo apt install whois

If you’re a Windows user, you can download the WHOIS CLI here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/whois.

To check for availability of a site, run whois sitename.tld. E.g:

$ whois example.com

If it’s been registered, you’ll get a result like so…

If not, you’ll get something like this…

Last modified on 2023-03-14