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Re: today's Wash Post Business section

  • From: Marshall Eubanks
  • Date: Thu Dec 21 06:17:21 2006 
Hello;

On Dec 20, 2006, at 11:20 PM, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:


On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:48:06 -0500
Edward Lewis <[email protected]> wrote:


Yeah, granted anyone looking for myspace might meet that demographic,
but how many neophytes would use Google for a "IP Who Is" "search"?
That's the listing I thought odd.


Maybe it's a script written and run by someone semi-clueful -- or too
clueful to use a real whois server, which might notice the attempt to
enumerate the space.  Google undoubtedly knows in some sense but
doesn't care.
Or, maybe it is just people looking for ip whois servers, since all of the returns "above the fold" for "ip who is" are
to entities (ARIN, RIPE, etc) running whois servers (directly or as a pass through).

Remember, this is a feedback system. If the people running the searches didn't ever click on ARIN, it wouldn't be kept at the
top of the list for this query. And I found that googling "ip who is <ip address>" rarely returned anything useful.

So I would conclude that there are a fair number of people using ip whois and using google to find servers, which is not that surprising.

Regards
Marshall




		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb