Using a search engine
Search engines are huge farms of computers that comb the Web and keep track of what’s out there. When you need to find something, the search engine looks in its index of Web pages and pulls out what you’re looking for.
Most people go to a search engine and type in query phrases such as "real estate agent," which tells the search engine to find all the pages that are about real estate agents. Search engines also support some other ways of querying them that let you be more specific.
One of these ways is to use the site operator, which limits your search to a given Web site. You then look within the site for common strings like "contact us" or "e-mail."
Most search engines support the site operator, which is simply the word site, followed by a colon (:), then the name of the web site you’re looking for.
Figure 4-14:
A Web search for site: contact us.
Fortunately for me, the first result was the one I was looking for. Sometimes you have to try some of the other results or try a variant of "contact us," but if the page exists on the Web site, you’ll find it.
This technique is also good for finding other information.
Checking the domain registration
If you were to get a domain name of your own (as opposed to using space on someone else’s), then you’d have to register the name. The registration process requires that you give some contact information, which is stored in a public registry. People can query this registry, called the Whois database, in order to find out how to contact the owner of a domain.
Depending on the company that owns the domain, the name you get back might be a generic phone number or it might be the owner of the company. Most larger companies will register as a generic entity like "Name registrations," but the e-mail address and phone number will go to a real person. This prevents the company from having to update all their domains when people change jobs.
That’s no problem, because half the battle is finding a living, breathing, human being to talk to. After you’ve got someone on the line, a few kind words should get you the person you’re looking for.
Figure 4-15 shows the front page of http://dnstools.com, which is a site that automates the lookup of a domain’s owner. Browse to the site and enter the name of the domain you want to search.
Figure 4-15:
Searching for the owner
When you click the Go! button, you are given the registration information for the domain. You usually get several names back:
♦ Technical contact: This is the person you’re supposed to call with technical problems about the name, so it usually leads to the company’s IT department.
♦ Billing contact: This is usually the accounts payable team. "Billing" refers to who pays the bills for the cost of the domain registration and not about customer billing.
♦ Administrative contact: This is a generic business contact.
If you don’t see all of these, don’t fret. Sometimes, companies combine several of the roles into one contact record. Doing this makes it easier for you, as there are fewer people you have to try!
When contacting these people, explain how you found their name and what it is you’re looking for. Chances are this person won’t be the exact person you need, so try to get them to put you in touch with the person you do want to talk to.
