If you decided to register a domain name or you are looking for one, the Whois services can help you in many ways to find particular information about a certain domain name. The Whois services can be accessed from a console window, Windows applications or web based applications. The Whois queries allow you to find a lot of useful information about top level domain names (TLDs).

When you perform a Whois query, a database is interrogated and the action of response will determine the output of various details of a particular domain name record, depending of the whois query syntax. For example in Linux, the command (without quotes) "whois domain.com" will output the domain.com registration information in a console application. The basic use of Whois services is to find out if a certain domain is registered or not. If Whois queries are employed from certain Windows applications, such as ActiveWhois-Browser you can obtain various information concerning the hosting details and domain owner, such as IP address, country, email and phone number.

The web-based applications are most friendly when you need whois domain records information. They are easy to use, too. There are web applications that provide only the details of the whois records and others that output a detailed report about a domain name with an easy to understand structure. You just fill in a form of the domain name and hit a button. Then the application outputs information regarding the domain in a single web browser window.

Besides the domain owner information and hosting details they can provide front page information, SEO details, domain registration data (creation and expiration date), details of subdomains and page views per user, related links, Alexa traffic rank, similar domain names, meta tags description and more. In conclusion, when you need to register a domain name, it is recommended to use the whois services in order to save time and to see various detailed information concerning concurrent sites that could help you to improve your domain name or site traffic.