domain name search tool

Apologies if this question has been answered a number of times...

I have someone who wants to add domain name search capabilities to his site (similar to NetSol or register.com)..but not domain registration, just search.

I looked on ICANN and InterNic and did a google search but not finding any info or tools.

Any ideas are very much appreciated.

TIA

What I did was write a whois client in C then I wrote perl scripts which executed the C client to make lookups. Then I have profiles for each TLD so that it queries the appropriate whois server with the proper command. Then it does a regular expression search of the returned text to determine if the domain is available.

If you know somebody who is interested in writing a similar script here's my whois server list which took me quite a while to compile:

LINK REMOVED (broken)

of course I'd be glad to write him a similar script for a fee.