If you have a domain name, you can use one of the numerous Whois tools to determine its owner. Whois provides complete information about the owner of any domain name, up to the level of mailing addresses and telephone numbers. But what if you don?t have a domain name? What if all you have is a mere IP address? Or what if you don?t need information about the domain name, but are much more interested in who owns the Web server where it?s hosted?

Quite often it is still possible to determine the owner, or, rather, the assignee, of an IP address. IP addresses in North America are assigned by ARIN, an independent, nonprofit corporation that provides IP registration. It is possible to unveil details about the organization that uses a particular IP address, or, to be precise, a block of IP addresses.

There are no tools that come with Windows which can look up information about an IP address. Instead, you can visit ARIN database, learn about its query syntax, and fire up search on an IP address. If the address does not belong to the North American block, you will quite often see only the basic information specifying the country and organization responsible for assigning IP addresses there. To discover owner information of your original IP address, you then will have to visit a whois server of that organization and repeat the whole process.

While there?s nothing wrong in doing all these queries, it takes an awful lot of time. We at Soft Institute wrapped the same thing into a convenient package. SI Lookup queries the right server right automatically, and returns clearly legible, well formatted output. It displays all the vital information and allows you to query more than one IP address by simply selecting it from a combo box. Thanks to its user-friendly, convenient user interface, SI Lookup is much more convenient to use than the online tools that Unix-age non-profit organizations provide on the Web.