Dear Ben,
Name.Space has adjusted its smart Whois (sWhois) to
deal with the fragmented whois. Please see
http://swhois.net It works and will automatically
scale as new registrars come online.
FYI, It took my engineer about 15 minutes to do
what NSI should have done at their end to begin with!
Best regards,
Paul Garrin
Founder/CEO
Name.Space, Inc.
>Currently it seems that there is no single authoritative WHOIS. Rather,
>each registrar keeps its own data of its own registrants. This makes it
>difficult to figure out whether a domain is truly available for
>registration, so we've rigged up a search system to simultaneously query all
>operating testbed registrars for information about a given domain.
>
>The system is totally experimental -- perhaps it has bugs we don't know
>about, it's certainly a little sluggish, and the formatting still leaves
>something to be desired. We may not keep it up in the long term, but at
>least for now we think it may be helpful.
>
>I welcome any comments (on- or off-list) about the script, interface, or
>concept in general. In particular, I'm interested in other Testbed
>Registrars that are already accepting registrations and have WHOIS data
>available about their registrations; if anyone knows of additional such
>registrars, please send details.
>
>The Experimental Cross-Registrar WHOIS is at
><http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/whois>.
>
>Ben Edelman
>Berkman Center for Internet and Society
>Harvard Law School
