Maybe OT, but surprising enough -
On this link to a graphic printed in today's Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/12/20/GR2006122000089.html
The #10 google search in the "Who Is" category (leading off with Borat, Hezbollah, EU, hot, ...) is "IP Who Is".
I'm not sure what to make of that. Has google replaced the whois client?
The article for the graphic is on this link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/19/AR2006121901471.html
Edward Lewis <Ed.Lewis@neustar.biz> writes:
The #10 google search in the "Who Is" category (leading off with
Borat, Hezbollah, EU, hot, ...) is "IP Who Is".I'm not sure what to make of that. Has google replaced the whois client?
Well, the article talks about people using "myspace" as a search term,
when their goal is apparently to get to a web site. This seems to be
a case of the same thing.
I just tried a few variants of search to get whois data for a block
that's assigned but not been used publicly (so as to avoid mail header
hits etc) out of Google - no dice.
If you search (literally) for "ip who is", though, the top hit is for
the ARIN web-based whois, the second is for someone I'm not familiar
with, the third for RIPE, the 7th for APNIC, etc.
ARIN employee lurkers on the list would be better suited to giving us
the stats, but my impression has been that the great unwashed masses
have used the web forms in preference to the command line client for
years now.
---Rob
And people wonder why simple concepts like "net neutrality" confuse people.. 
Many people don't understand anything about how they access the Internet, they have a vague idea that they need to type a domain name into a box somewhere... so they type www.myspace.com into the Google search box, the result set pops up, and then they click on the first result to get to the web site in question... I've seen it more than once.
Thomas
Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
Yeah, granted anyone looking for myspace might meet that demographic, but how many neophytes would use Google for a "IP Who Is" "search"? That's the listing I thought odd.
Maybe it's a script written and run by someone semi-clueful -- or too
clueful to use a real whois server, which might notice the attempt to
enumerate the space. Google undoubtedly knows in some sense but
doesn't care.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
Edward Lewis <Ed.Lewis@neustar.biz> writes:
Yeah, granted anyone looking for myspace might meet that demographic,
but how many neophytes would use Google for a "IP Who Is" "search"?
That's the listing I thought odd.
There would be very few of them if it weren't for spam.
---rob
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Edward Lewis wrote:
Yeah, granted anyone looking for myspace might meet that demographic,
but how many neophytes would use Google for a "IP Who Is" "search"?
That's the listing I thought odd.
Having looked at the article isn't this a case of someone looking for an IP
Whois tool rather than actually looking up IP addresses?
- --
COO
Entanet International
T: 0870 770 9580
Hello;
Yeah, granted anyone looking for myspace might meet that demographic,
but how many neophytes would use Google for a "IP Who Is" "search"?
That's the listing I thought odd.Maybe it's a script written and run by someone semi-clueful -- or too
clueful to use a real whois server, which might notice the attempt to
enumerate the space. Google undoubtedly knows in some sense but
doesn't care.
Or, maybe it is just people looking for ip whois servers, since all of the returns "above the fold" for "ip who is" are
to entities (ARIN, RIPE, etc) running whois servers (directly or as a pass through).
Remember, this is a feedback system. If the people running the searches didn't ever click on ARIN, it wouldn't be kept at the
top of the list for this query. And I found that googling "ip who is <ip address>" rarely returned anything useful.
So I would conclude that there are a fair number of people using ip whois and using google to find servers, which is not that surprising.
Regards
Marshall