Finding if domain name is already registered?

Question

Hi, Is there any API to lookup if a given domain name is already registerd by somebody and get alternative (auto suggested available domain names)?

EDIT:- I think the thing I need is called domain-search not the lookup :)

Answer 1

It's called whois... and for auto-suggestion, there is the domain service at 1&1.

Answer 2

I think you can use http://whois.domaintools.com/ to get the information. Send a web request as http://whois.domaintools.com/example.com and it will return the information of example.com. But you need to parse the response to filter the required information.

Answer 3

http://whois.bw.org/ is very good. does suggestions and such.

Answer 4

I want an api that I can call from my code or pages. The XML API on www.domaintools.com seems like the thing that I need. I'm looking into it.

Answer 5

I've written a whois for PHP, Perl, VB and C# all using a trick that queries '{domain}.whois-servers.net'.

It works well for all but the obscure domains that require registration (and usually fees) such as tonga .tv or .pro domains.

• PHP Whois (version 3.x but should still work)
• C# Whois
• COM Whois (DLL only, I lost the source)

This page shows it in action. You can do some simple string matching to check if a domain is registered or not based on the result you get back.

Answer 6

Hi Folks, thanks for your support. I've found a service by domaintools.com called whoisapi. You can query available domain names and other information by sending an xml request to their servers.