Do you need a domain name for your business and that on is already registered? Can’t you find the contact details of that website? There are many cases like this when you may like to contact the owner of a webpage and can’t find their details in the website. A common next step is to search for the registrant name, address, email by querying the WHOIS information of the domain name [e.g. www.insightsintechnology.com]. There are a number of online resources which provide that information for free but most requires to sign up or some tells you to query in another database for complete information.  Often the results are displayed as an image, so extracting details requires laborious manual typing over and over again. If you have been fed up with all these, then you may like to have a look at FastWhoIs by Iconico. It can query for a list of domain names in a number of Whois servers. It has added functionality to parse in a web address using regular expressions to search for domain names, email addresses, phone numbers etc.

• FastWhoIs comes as a small installer [705 Kb] without a digital signature. Installation is clean and fast, requires 2.8 Mb of disk space. Desktop & Quick Launch icons are not created automatically.
• The software runs on Windows XP to Windows 7, both 32 and 64 bit versions are supported. .Net Framework 2.0 is needed for proper functioning of the software. Although there is no such requirement of the RAM and CPU speed, higher configuration will of course make the processing faster.
• FastWhoIs GUI is not very exciting but is designed to easily access all the features.

Main GUI

• The software minimizes to tray by showing a tray tip.

• Domain names can be entered manually, in batch via a text file or by adding those in queue. It can also monitor clipboard text and run the query at specific intervals.

• The Whois servers it queries are

1. whois.tucows.com
2. whois.ripe.net
3. whois.directnic.com
4. whois.publicdomainregistry.com
5. whois.names4ever.com
6. whois.enterprice.net
7. whois.indom.com
8. whois.psi-usa.info
9. whois.dotregistrar.com
10. whois.melbourneit.com
11. whois.markmonitor.com
12. whois.easydns.com
13. whois.tmagnic.net
14. whois.netnames.com
15. whois.ascio.com
16. whois.joker.com
17. whois.corenic.net
18. whois.dotster.com
19. whois.namejuice.com
20. whois.4domains.com
21. whois.corporatedomains.com
22. whois.domainnamesales.com
23. whois.stargateinc.com
24. whois.schlund.info
25. whois.libris.com
26. whois.interdomain.net
27. whois.networksolutions.com
28. whois.godaddy.com

• The query can be made to single or all servers.
• The server list can be export as a text file.
• If you want to add a server to that list, export the list as a text file, edit and import that list.
• All the import and export operations can be set to a particular folder.

• Server settings can be managed.

• The query result can be appended to the existing list (default) or can be added after clearing the list. The query result can also be written on a text file.
• The software has a nice feature called Http Domains which is for retrieving domain names from web pages using Regular Expressions (Regex). Once retrieved, FastWhois can be used to view the information about these domain names. Since this section uses Regex, it can be used actually to search for anything by changing the regular expression.

• There are two ways to use Http Domains. In words of the developer

1. The ‘Wizard generated pattern’ mode is the mode in which you specify a few requested settings such as the number of words in the domain and the domain extension (or the TLD) and the program generates the regular expression which is needed to search for those domains. This is done in Step 2 (after you’ve selected ‘Wizard generated pattern’ in Step 1).
Once you have defined how many words your domains look like and what extension they should have in Step 2, then in Step 3 you need to press the “Add Pattern” button which will add the regular expression defined to the list of patterns which will be used for searching the domains. You can have as many patters (regular expressions) as you want when searching which means you can search for all domains with a single name and a specified extension and you can also search for all domains with 2, 3, 4, or more words and a specified extension.
Once you have your search patterns (regular expressions) in Step 2 and Step 3 you need to add the web pages in which you want to perform the search. You can add these web pages in Step 4.
Once you have added all your web pages where the search will take place, then you can start the search by pressing the “Start Parsing” button in Step 4.
The bottom tab page which is called “Retrieved Words” will show your results and the one called ”Web Address Parsing Details” will show if there were any issues while parsing a web page.
2. The second mode is when you select ‘User specific pattern’ and this one behaves exactly like the mode described above except that the user has to enter his own search pattern (regular expression). Because the user can enter his search pattern it means that the search can be run for anything: phone numbers, zip codes, email addresses, URLs to other pages, etc not only domain names as in the first mode.