What Happens if Whois is Worthless?

Peter gives away some great advice in Domain Name Shopping at DMOZ & ODP — so good that I hesitate to draw any more attention to it. Seeing as how it’s already out there, though, I thought I’d go ahead and add one thing that he left out.

Sometimes the whois information for a domain can be worthless. Either the domain owner has decided to pay for a private registration or the information is just plain wrong. In cases like that, the Wayback Machine very often gives me what I need. You can go back to the 90s when most people had copious amounts of contact information on their sites, and you’ll be surprised at how often that contact information is still valid. On the whole, I get much better results from using that info than I do from using the Whois info.