Exploiting DNS traffic to rank internet domains

Search engines and Internet service providers rank domains leveraging on search hits, information gathered through social networks, advertisement campaigns, and third-party applications such as web-browser extensions. Unfortunately, these methods are difficult to implement and deploy as they require substantial amount of traffic and data to be analysed. In this paper we describe a novel methodology for ranking Internet domains based on DNS (Domain Name System) traffic. The advantage is that by analysing a limited amount of traffic it is possible to create comprehensive rankings without having to monitor massive amounts of data. DNS traffic collected at “.it” DNS domain servers has been used to validate this work on a large scale, and create daily rankings of Italian Internet domains.