Years ago, if an app annoyed me, I shrugged and dealt with it. I could sometimes have fixed it or built my own, but the annoyance rarely justified the effort. With LLMs that calculation has changed, and this past weekend it changed for a domain lookup tool.
Occasionally I need to check DNS records or registration info for a domain. At my computer I use dig or whois. Otherwise I Google "domain lookup tool," click on one, and paste in the domain. Most of what comes up is slow, buried in upsells, and unpleasant to use for something that should be simple.
They aren't badly made -- they're well made for a different job. A domain lookup answers a question nobody pays to ask, so many of the free tools that show up in search are the ones a sales funnel justifies: the lookup brings in someone who might buy a domain or hosting, and the page is built to rank for "domain lookup tool" and to sell. The tools you find are the ones built to be found. Being good at the lookup was never what paid for them.
