14 DAY TRIAL // Whois functions are pretty useful, especially if you're looking to get information about certain domains every once in a while. There are lots of services out there which provide this type of function but most users would prefer to conduct a whois straight from their desktop or using one of their favorite web services. Google has introduced such a feature a long time ago but, due to undisclosed reasons, it removed the function from its search engine.
However, it seems like Google's whois utility just got revamped and is now available to all the users, even if some people said they were unable to use it a few days ago.
What's interesting is that conducting a whois on Google does not provide too many details compared to other services on the web because the search query only provides the registration and the expiring date of the domain you searched for. The information provided by Google is given by domaintools.com but it seems like it doesn't do this for all the domains out there as entering a .ro domain does not return any relevant result.
"However, it seems the data being displayed is not coming live from the WHOIS record, so Google must be caching the information somewhere. It has been suggested in the past that Google may use this WHOIS data as part of its ranking algorithms, possibly giving weight to those domains which are registered for longer periods," Tony Ruscoe of Google Blogoscoped wrote.
Although I wasn't able to reproduce it, it seems like some users may be restricted when conducting whois searches without being logged in with their Google accounts. "Security : Anonymous user may be too resource intensive. You have reached your daily lookup limit as an guest user. Please login or register," the error states according to Ionut Alex Chitu.