So, you’re not running into a poorly-documented mystery, you’ve run afoul of one of the rotten armpits of the shub-Internet.
So there's no consensus between NICs for the information they should have in whois and what search mechanisms they should provide? I guess what you're saying is that whois is just a protocol definition and nothing else?
Correct. It gets you a blob of text. Sometimes, a blob is just a blob. Other times, it contains what _appear_ to be key-value pairs, but are instead loosely-formatted text. Other times, it contains textually-represented key-value pairs that are programmatically generated from an actual database, and can thus be re-imported into another database. Depends what’s on the back end. -Bill