Converting Domain name to Company Name?

Question

Hello All,

Is there are way / online service / database available to convert a domain name such as maxmind.com to the company name "Max Mind Inc." ?

If not, can someone suggest a logical programmatic way to approach the problem?

I was thinking on the following lines:

1. Take Domain name
2. Visit the website - try to find company name (not sure how though?)
3. Do a Whois - If company name is available use that ( might not always work)

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

hey jake.

2) i think point 2 is impossible. the title of a page does not always contain the company name. and other elements could be elsewhere on the page (if there is really a tag with the companyname and not just an image). the web is to dynamic for such a search.

3) is there really a company-page without an matching whois entry? there are a lot of domain's out there from private people (without a companyname). a blog on an own domain is such an sample. you find the name of the registered person on whois, but you don't know, if this person is the author of the page.

why do you need such an service and do not only use the domainname?

Answer 2

Hairy question!

The WHOIS query will fail spectacularly in a number of cases: shared servers, Akamai or other CDNs, domains not company related, etc. I come from a web agency background and I can tell you as a fact that a large (two digit) percentage of companies don't care about owning all their domain names -- they let the web agency deal with it, especially in relation to small promo sites.

My best advice would be this. Get the home page or the site map if available. Look for a copyright symbol. This could be in a limited number of forms: "& copy;", "(c)", "©". Also the statement form is usually either "company (c) year" or "(c) year company". From this you can get the company.

It will not work in all cases, but it's likely your best option.

Answer 3

I would combine Sklivvz suggestion with at least title tag inspection and if possible Whois records.

If you parse the copyright notice of stackoverflow.com you either end up with "stackoverflow.com" or "stackoverflow.com LLC" and that is kind of irrelevant.

In the maxmind.com example if you parse the legal notice "Copyright © 2009 MaxMind, Inc." you either end up with "MaxMind" or "MaxMind, Inc.", if you combine with the title tag "Geolocation and Online Fraud Prevention from MaxMind" the only word that appears at both places is MaxMind.

Also domaintools.com breaks the domain name into words (everyone can change it though), you can parse this page and grab the "real" name, some examples:

http://whois.domaintools.com/maxmind.com = Max Mind
http://whois.domaintools.com/dabbledb.com = Dabble Db
http://whois.domaintools.com/domaintools.com = Domain Tools
http://whois.domaintools.com/stackoverflow.com = Stack Overflow
http://whois.domaintools.com/joelonsoftware.com = Joel On Software

aboutus.org might also be a very good reference when avaliable:

http://aboutus.org/maxmind.com = MaxMind LLC 
http://aboutus.org/dabbledb.com = ...
http://aboutus.org/domaintools.com = DomainTools.com 
http://aboutus.org/stackoverflow.com = Stack Overflow AG
http://aboutus.org/joelonsoftware.com = Fog Creek Software Inc.