Lookalikes
Lookalikes is a feature available to paid commmunity and enterprise users that allows you to search for lexicographically similar domains in the Validin database. For the time being, lookalikes searching is only supported on up to the last 180 days of newly observed domains, but Validin is working on bringing support for matching regex patterns across the entire domain set.
Searching for lookalikes is supported in one of two ways:
- Generic Search Terms
- Regex patterns
Generic Search
To start a generic search, type a domain name, company name, or brand to search, then click “Search.” Validin will automatically generate and search for a variety of regex patterns that satisfy some of the following conditions to search for potential lookalike domains:
- Typos
- Homoglyphs
- Addition/Subtraction of Characters
Starting a generic search for domains that look like "validin"
Regex Search
To start a regex search, write a regex expression and wrap it in forward slashes (e.g. /[0-9a-z]+/). Wrapping a regex expression in slashes will change the icon next to the search input to a R, meaning that the search will be done in Regex mode. Validin only supports a subset of regex characters at this time, if your regex expression is too complicated or uses characters that Validin doesn't support, you will recieve an error when you start a search.
Starting a Regex Search for Any Domain
Search Filters
Lookalikes supports the following search filters:
- Excluded Domains
- Domains that you want to exclude from the result set, e.g. searching for usps lookalikes, you would want to exclude the false positive ups.com
- Limit
- Result limit (reflects your regular result limit for your plan)
- Lookback
- Search domains up to this lookback, supported maximum is 180 days
- Depth
- What depth do you want to search for? (only effective second level domains, effective third level domains, or everything)
Search Results
The search may take up to 30 seconds to complete. Once finished, Validin will display the matching domain, a summary of recent resolving infrastructure, and a score describing the similarity to the queried domain (0 means “very close match,” and higher numbers are a further edit distance match).
For enterprise users, Validin also annotates the result with the registrar and the registration time. If Validin doesn't have any historic or cached registration results for a domain, we will prompt you to fetch the results using the "Fetch Registration" button in the table.
Like the other tables, you can click on different cells to open slideouts. Clicking on the recent DNS will open an expanded view showing details about what resolved.
Clicking on recent DNS results will show specific details about what resolved