Is WHOIS still a thing?
Not really, and that is worth knowing before you trust an old tool. WHOIS was a plain text service that answered on port 43, and ICANN stopped requiring registries and registrars to run it on 28 January 2025. It has been replaced by RDAP, which returns properly structured data over a secure connection.
Most people still call it a WHOIS lookup, and that is fine. What matters is that RDAP carries information the old format could not, including a machine-readable list of exactly which contact fields a registrar withheld. Every tool here reads RDAP.
One thing that trips everybody up: there are two servers holding two different records, and they do not say the same things. The registry runs the ending and is the authority on dates, status codes, nameservers and DNSSEC. The registrar is the company the domain was bought through, and for most endings it is the only party holding any contact details.
youregistryregistrar
Which domain extensions can be looked up?
Not every ending publishes RDAP. Of the 1,438 endings in the root zone, 1,203 are ones we can look up, using the official IANA directory plus a small reviewed list of registries that run RDAP without being listed there. The remaining 235 we cannot check at all, and the tools say so rather than showing you a blank that looks like an answer. The TLD directory lists every one, and it was last refreshed on 2026-07-28.
None of these tools can show you history. RDAP returns the current state of a record and nothing else, so there is no previous owner, no past nameserver, and no record of what changed last week. Anything claiming otherwise is selling you an archive someone built by saving daily copies.
Are these domain lookups private?
The name you enter is sent to the registry and registrar that operate that ending. There is no way around that, since they are the ones holding the answer. On our side we keep the registry's answer for a short while so that repeated lookups do not hammer them, and that cached answer is stored against the domain name only. Your address is used briefly to stop one person overloading the tools, it is never written next to a lookup, and we do not build any record of who searched for what.