I believe that whois does a wildcard search for all domains known to start with microsoft.com, and some funny people registered subdomains under their own domains that start with microsoft.com. But maybe I'm wrong :-)
Take a look at my response upthread - basically, they're not sub domains, they're arbitrarily registered name server entries to provide glue to other lookups. The Whois record is just the side effect
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I believe that whois does a wildcard search for all domains known to start with microsoft.com, and some funny people registered subdomains under their own domains that start with microsoft.com. But maybe I'm wrong :-)
OK. Next question - why does the verisign whois server know about arbitarily nested subdomains, instead of only top-level registrations?
Take a look at my response upthread - basically, they're not sub domains, they're arbitrarily registered name server entries to provide glue to other lookups. The Whois record is just the side effect
Correct, you can do an exact match using whois 'domain microsoft.com'
Ah yes, same applies to facebook.com and many others.