There’s now a ‘Whois’ link for all results, next to the similar pages and cache links after the summary. This uses the internet whois protocol to try to get information about the owner of the domain the page is on.

To use the new link, just click on it and the results of the whois search should show up in the preview pane. There’s usually a bunch of boilerplate standard information from the server holding the information, followed by the information about who the domain is actually registered to.

Since the whois servers hold the owners names, emails and phone numbers if they’ve not gone with a private listing, I had to be careful about how I offered this within SearchMash. In particular, I didn’t want to overload the whois servers providing the information, so I’m careful to only put in requests when you click on a link, rather than pre-fetching as I do for web pages. This is basic courtesy to the owners of the servers, and also complies with their terms of use designed to prevent robots from harvesting addresses for spam.