We have added another utility to our swiss army knife of utilities. This one is the whois utility or function. It will return domain information for a specified domain. If the domain is registered, it will provide various bits of information such as registration date, expiry data, renewal date and so forth. If the domain is not registered, it will let you know that too.
The main reason for adding such a utility is the whois utility uses its own unique tcp port to communicate with the whois service. Many companies block this port (usually only allowing browsing). So in order to use whois within such a company, you need to find one which works through a browser. Well, look no further, you have found it.
What about IP addresses? Well, throw in an IP address and see what happens. All part of the whois database lookup.