Word of advise to people who want to register domain names. Do not use the whois or be very careful of the who is. Domain Stealers aka scum aka parasites have put spyware in many of the cctld whois registries looking for good ideas that they can make a quick buck. I used an who is for a certain cctld and i found good names and the next day those were taken. I checked the whois and they are registered to the same location. Seriously to the people who are doing this practice you should be ashamed of yourselves.
It is the registrar you used that is giving out the search records. There is no spyware or anything, it is a business deal. I had it happen to me many times before I realized this simple fact. I recommend you to use whois.domaintools.com for your future research. I am also using domainsbot.com and to this day the mentioned "idea stealing" hasn't happened. Also, if those domains were too good to leave, check to see (better, set an alarm) if they are available again in the next week or so. Some buyers buy domains and "taste" them, i.e see if there is traffic coming to them, and if not, just cancel them and get their registration money back. It is better, then, that you don't go visit the domain and create traffic (this is purely my speculation, they are probably smarter).
yeah what im talking about is ccltd though. Domainsbot can only do the major ones. I know about domain tasting but thats when you get a 5 day grace for deletion and I think its only with the major extensions right? Selling the report, really? I have not heard about that before. That sounds pretty shady. If you can, explain more about that.
if you dont buy my point about spyware, check this: http://www.techchee.com/2007/07/19/spyware-steals-domain-name/
What I meant to say was, for them to steal your ideas they don't have to install spyware and that most bigger players probably work with the registrar itself. But, now that I think about it, the spyware research must be quite valuable as well, and I don't see any reason why these crooks wouldn't go into that field as well. Thanks for pointing it out for us. You should always have your computer free of spyware in any case, whatever you are doing online. About searching for ccTLD, I think you should find a registrar that allows search on the particular ccTLD you are interested in, select that ccTLD but do the search for .com. When I need to search for say "something.org" on Godaddy, I always search for something.com, even though I am sure it is taken. The results also show me whether something.org is also available or not. Do it for you ccTLD if it is available there (or elsewhere). About domaintools reports... those reports are for IP history, reverse IP etc. They are not selling queries as far as I know. I really don't think they would, they have built some good brand equity on that premise.