Morgret Designs

One tool was not mentioned when people were trying to determine how Matt Cutts found a plethora of domain names registered to the same person. While it turns out nearly all of the sites Matt listed were actually on the homepage of the parent organization, one could have gone to AboutUs.org and found many of those related sites.
AboutUs.org “is a wiki whose goal is to create a free and valuable Internet resource containing information both about websites and other related data. The site was pre-populated with information about many different websites and thousands of updates are now being made by people each day” (from their about page). What their statement doesn’t mention is that the pre-populated information comes from a lot of Whois data, and many of those updates are people going to the site to remove their whois information from the aboutus website.

If you enter a website name that is not in the database, the AboutUs bot will visit that site and instantly create an entry. You can put in a robots.txt entry to disallow the User-agent: AboutUsBot, and visitors to the page will get a notice that the owner has elected not to initialize their AboutUs page with content. Visitors familiar with the site are then invited to edit the page and contribute to the page.

If you enter a website name that is in their database, you get the title, excerpt from the page, address and map of the domain registrant, contact information, and possibly related domains. In the case of the Allied Schools domains that Matt found, many of them were listed in the Related Domains section. You can edit and remove contact information — but it is easy to see prior versions of the website. This page has a summary of their responses to concerns of users regarding all of the information that is displayed.

My first reaction to this site was as negative as the posts on other blogs and the reactions people had when they thought Google had secret ways of viewing domain ownership. As I thought on things a bit, I find it interesting how this one particular aggregation of data has everyone upset — yet people thank Rand for posting A List of Every Website Statistic Publicly Available that includes DomainTools, which is registered to the same address as AboutUs. Even so, the AboutUsBot is now in my robots.txt file.