Why can't I whois '.google' domains?

Solution 1:

There's no good reliable starting point for a WHOIS client. It's more or less an "illusion" that you can use whois without also specifying the whois server to query.

I'll refer to my answer here https://serverfault.com/a/615848/183318 for the available means of finding the proper WHOIS server for a TLD.
Only the method of querying IANA (WHOIS or http) is actually reliable but then instead ends you up with a huge blob of text that is relatively expensive to fetch and which also needs to parsed in a possibly semi-fuzzy manner.

Eg

$ whois -h whois.iana.org google | grep ^whois
whois:        domain-registry-whois.l.google.com
$

Most WHOIS clients seem to instead rely on having a config file primed with the "known" TLDs and some falling back to a DNS lookup for example.whois-servers.net (which does not have an entry for google.whois-servers.net yet). I don't know how common it is for clients to even attempt a query for _nicname._tcp.example. SRV.

Solution 2:

Whois gets it's data from the registrar of the domain your are querying for.

In case of Google's "brand TLD" the registrar is Charleston Road Registry (CRR), CRR is in turn a subsidy of Google.

There's a SuperUser post with the proper way of configuring your whois client for the new TLDs.

For the google TLD, you would need to query domain-registry-whois.l.google.com as it is the whois server holding the registration information for .google.

You can look at the Registry Information section in the delegation record here.