The registry layer
whois and RDAP field by field: what is public, what redaction removed, and why the last-changed date is the field that proves a domain changed hands.
Read the record fields Web catalog · since 2011
Full Information About Any website
What the records say, where the numbers came from, and which of those sources still exist. WebTumble is a web catalog that accumulates data related to websites.
whois · RDAP · DNS records · delegation · domain lifecycle · authority metrics
Website data
Three layers of what can be known
Almost everything published about a website belongs to one of three layers, and confusing them is where most bad conclusions start. The registry layer is what the domain declares about itself through its registrar: creation date, last modification, expiry, and the nameservers it points at. It is authoritative, because the registry is the party that would know, and it is narrow, because it says nothing about the site itself.
The resolution layer is how that name becomes an address. It is where mail routing, verification tokens and the actual server addresses live, and it is the layer that decides whether a perfectly valid registration resolves to anything at all. A domain with no delegation is registered and unreachable at the same time: a state that looks, to most tools, exactly like a domain that was never registered.
The measurement layer is the one everybody quotes and nobody can verify. Traffic figures, authority scores and reputation ratings are all produced from the outside, from samples and models, by companies that may or may not still be trading. That last part matters more than it sounds.
The reference
Read the record, not the summary
Eleven reference pages, each one built from the record outwards: what the field is, what it is not, and the specific mistake it invites.
The resolution layer
Seven record types with a worked example each, plus delegation and the state where a registered domain resolves to nothing whatsoever.
Read the record typesThe measurement layer
Traffic estimates, authority scores and reputation checks: how each is built, what it cannot see, and how much of this layer has closed down.
Read all eleven pagesCatalog index
Terms this catalog covers
Every entry is a curated list of sources for one term: annotated, dated, and checked by hand rather than scraped. Eight are kept as full entries.
Full entries
Four entries worth opening first
Each one sits at the path it has always occupied, in the format the catalog has always used, with every source named and dated.
Flagship report
The dead measurement web
Nine public tools that measured the web have closed. The report dates each one, says what it measured, and names what replaced it.
Between 2011 and 2023 the free, public measurement layer of the web was dismantled almost completely. Individually each closure was a footnote. Together they removed the ability to check a claim about a website without paying for it, and left a decade of citations pointing at endpoints that answer nothing. The report is the list, with dates.
Open the report
Yahoo Site Explorer · 2005 – 2011The last free, public backlink index. Its closure created the paid link-data market.
Technorati Authority · 2002 – 2014Blog authority from inter-blog links, discontinued inside a post about a site redesign.
Google Toolbar PageRank · 2000 – 2016The public nought-to-ten score. Withdrawn from view; PageRank itself still runs internally.
Web of Trust · 2007 – 2016Crowd-sourced reputation, pulled from the extension stores after a data-handling finding.
Compete · 2000 – 2016Clickstream panel estimates for United States traffic. Absorbed, then withdrawn.
Klout · 2008 – 2018A nought-to-hundred influence score, closed on the day GDPR took effect.
Alexa Rank · 1996 – 2022A toolbar-panel ranking quoted as though it were a census. Closed by Amazon after 26 years.
Universal Analytics · 2012 – 2023The most widely deployed first-party measurement ever built. Stopped processing data.
McAfee SiteAdvisor · 2005 – retiredAutomated safety ratings. Folded into the consumer product; the public lookup went.
1996–2022Alexa Rankclosed by Amazon
2000–2016Competewithdrawn
2005–2011Yahoo Site Explorerlast free index
9tools documented as closedflagship report
Decoders
Three things you can do here
The catalog does not query anything on your behalf, because the services it would have queried are gone. What it can do is explain a record you already have. Paste a whois or RDAP block into the record field decoder and every line comes back named, with a note on whether it is authoritative and whether redaction applies.
The DNS record decoder takes a single zone-file line and separates its parts, owner, class, type, TTL and payload, which is the fastest way to see why a record is being ignored. The lifecycle calculator takes an expiry date and returns the grace, redemption, pending-delete and drop windows that follow it, because those five dates are what actually decide whether a name can still be recovered.
All three run entirely in the browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is logged, and each one links back to the reference page that explains the fields it just named.
All reference pages
The full index
Eleven reference pages, three decoders, one report and eight catalog entries: nothing here sits more than one click away.
The whois recordReading an RDAP responseDNS record typesNameservers and delegationThe domain lifecycleHow traffic is estimatedAlexa Rank, 1996 to 2022Site safety and reputationBacklinks and referring domainsAuthority metrics comparedrobots.txt and crawl limits Record field decoderDNS record decoderLifecycle calculator Catalog index Domain profiles The dead measurement web
Questions
Questions about this catalog
Four things readers ask most often about what this catalog is and how current it is.
What does WebTumble cover?
Three layers of website data. The registry layer is the whois and RDAP record a domain publishes about itself. The resolution layer is DNS: the record types, the nameservers and the delegation chain that turn a name into an address. The measurement layer is everything estimated from the outside, traffic, authority, reputation, including the tools that used to supply those numbers and no longer exist.
Is the website data here live or looked up on demand?
Neither. WebTumble is a reference catalog, not a lookup service. Each page explains what a record contains and how to read it, and the three decoders work entirely in your own browser on text you paste in. Nothing is queried, stored or sent anywhere.
Why does the catalog cover so many unrelated subjects?
Because a catalog is organised by the question asked, not by a single subject. The eight catalog entries kept in full range from a 2009 mobile game to academic appendix formatting, and each one is a curated list of sources for that term, annotated and dated. The reference section is where the website-data material lives.
How current is the information?
Every source on every catalog entry carries the date it was last reached, and the reference pages name the year each measurement tool closed. Where a number is quoted, the page says where it came from. Where a service has shut down, the entry records that instead of linking to a dead endpoint.