Ask HN: What's going on with Google's WHOIS record?
5 comments
Many of those look like prefixes, so I think you version of whois is looking up any name record that contains google.com, across all domain registries. Certainly, many of those don't seem to be google.com-owned entries, but rather misleading addresses designed to capture people who enter google.com but resolve to a non-google.com server.
Most of that has nothing to do with Google's WHOIS record, it has to do with other people who have created domain names with "GOOGLE.COM" as a substring, specifically so that their own stuff will show up when you do "WHOIS GOOGLE.COM".
Those are subdomains. So for example if I owned the domain somedomain.com - I could create a subdomain called google.somedomain.com which is what you are seeing.
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Anyone have an explanation?