I understand that the owner of a web site is required to give his (or
her) name & address to the site's Registrar, who then posts it on the
"WHOIS" portion of the Registrar's web site.

I am trying to find the owner of a web site those address has the
following format:

www.xxx.yyy.com 

Where xxx (the subdoman) is a series of alpha characters 

Where yyy is another series of alpha characters. 

I understand that the xxx field is the "subdomain" and should be
excluded when inputting to the "WHOIS" function.

I have tried inputting www.yyy.com into the Registrar's WHOIS service,
but when I contact the resulting name, he swears he is not the owner
and knows nothing about it.

What is the correct way to find the owner of a web site?

I'm sure you have your reasons for masking the address of the actual
site, but should you change your mind on this, let us know, so that we
can look into the whois information in more detail.

As is, though, the most anyone can do is steer you towards sources
that MAY have the information you need.

At one time, almost all sites had clear-cut identification in their
whois records, but with the passage of time, both rules and behaviors
have changed.  As a result, not all whois records contain contact
information for the site owner, and some of them contain misleading
information.

To explore the site in question:


Head to   http://domain-search.domaintools.com/


I have consistently found this to be the bst whois service available.


Conduct a variety of searches here, and see what you get, starting
with the full domain name [ www.xxx.yyy.com ] to see if this returns a
whois record.

If not, then begin to narrow things down by searching on just parts of
the name.  For instance, a search here on [ xxx yyy ] produces 34
results:


http://domain-search.domaintools.com/?service=512&de_search=Search&q=xxx+yyy


Perhaps the site in question (when you substitute the appropriate
terms for xxx and yyy) will appear in the results.


You can also try searches on simply [ xxx ] or [ yyy ] although be
aware that if these are commonly letter combinations, your search will
likely return thousands of sites.


When you find the whois registration record, of course, you will want
to look for the contact information that is generally included with
the record.

But beyond that, you should also look at the registration record to
see how long the site has been in existence.  If it has existed for
more than just a year or two, there are probably older whois records
available that can be accessed through services that keep historical
whois files (there is a fee for accessing these records).


Also, many websites include contact information at the site itself,
though it is often tucked away in Privacy Notices, or Copyright files.
 If you care to post the name of the site you're interested in, I'd be
glad to look at it directly to try and identify any contact
information that might be available.

Good luck with this...let me know if there's anything else you need.


pafalafa-ga

Excellent