URL to check if domain is available

Question

I use AJAX to check Australian domain availability with this web service: http://portal.ausregistry.com.au/whois/whois_check_result.jsp?qry=[AU domain goes here]

Are there equivalent services that expose availability for other TLD's? (particularly the big 3: .com, .org, .net)

Answer 1

While I've never used it, you may want to check out whoisxmlapi (not free)

Well, whois lookups are free. Here is a PHP implementation that you can probably alter or convert to your language of choice.

Answer 2

Domain.com has a similar service, but it is not public, I'm afraid. You can use fetch.php for this.

Answer 3

You could use AJAX to do a scrape of certain strings in the HTML of any WHOIS site that takes URL/query string parameters (like http://whois.domaintools.com/yourdomain.com). Not a pretty solution but it'd get you by in a pinch.