According top Matt Cutts, Google is bringing the past to life. In January 2004, Google had introduced the WHOIS query, which displayed a domain’s date of creation and expiration, without mentioning name of the domain owner. WHOIS was coined as the shortest Google service ever. It appeared on the Google Search page on 7^th January 2004 and disappeared on 9^th January 2004.

However, Google has reintroduced this feature as ‘WHOIS OneBox‘. As of now Google has indicated that the domain data is being taken from the Domain Tools website with a direct link to the OneBox result title. However, many observers report that the WHOIS data doesn’t seem to be in real-time as predicted by Google. Therefore, it is speculated that Google might be caching the data to some other location.

There is another possibility, that the WHOIS data may be used by Google as a factor in its ranking algorithms. Thus providing more weightage to those domains that are registered for a long period of time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Search Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.