Great UI. Really takes advantage of the blurring of the line between perception of responsiveness and perception of actual speed. I don't think it's that much faster in real terms than instantdomainsearch, but it feels like it's way speedier.
It actually took me a while to figure out that red meant unavailable and blue meant available. And even after, that they have the same size and brightness made me miss IDS's clarity. But otherwise, I agree.
I really need something like this, and I think they've nailed the UX... but it appears to use GoDaddy to do the whois. I don't have any personal experience but a quick google search will back me up when I assert they are notorious for not being trustworthy with your whois queries. A site like this that I felt like I could trust would be a daily destination for me.
It's way too fast for whois. They're probably using the COM/NET/ORG Zone files in a nicely indexed db. I'd be interested to know more about the back end - they get points for responsiveness.
The way it shows the shorter / trimmed variants of what you type is interesting but not, I feel, particularly useful. It has a nice UI though and does seem very fast! It also only does com, net and org, whereas ajaxwhois, for example, does biz, us, info and ca.
