Welcome back to work, reporters. Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving, if you’re in the U.S. There’s been quite a lot of talk lately about biased or false information circulating on the Internet, so on that note, let’s talk about how to find out who owns or operates a website.
You can use Whois to find out who a website is registered to – including their name, email address, phone number and sometimes even physical address. For instance, notorious conspiracy site Infowars.com is registered to one Alex Jones in Austin, Texas.
Jones’ company, Free Speech Systems LLC, owns another 247 website domains, like “bigliesobama.com” and “alexjoneswakeupamerica.com”. (Somewhat disappointingly, “InfowarsBabes.com” just reroutes back to Infowars, so maybe his “Babes of NPR“-like spinoff didn’t go as planned.)
I use ViewDNS.info to do a “reverse Whois” – find a website by registrant, rather than the other way around.
Two caveats, though: Whois doesn’t work so well on non-U.S. addresses, i.e., ones that don’t end in “.com.” And if someone is registered through a third party like GoDaddy, you REALLY have to put some work in to track them down.
Even if you’re not doing some heavy-duty snooping, I use it all the time to track down people’s email addresses. Practically everyone has an associated website these days, listed in their Twitter bio or wherever. Just look up that site on Whois and you may get a hit. Happy hunting! 🕵️