Exploiting DNS Traffic to Rank Internet Domains

Search engines and Internet service providers rank domains leveraging both on search hits and information gathered through social networks, advertisements and third-party tools such web-browser plugins or mobile applications. Unfortunately, these methods are difficult to implement and deploy as they require substantial a amount of traffic and data to be analysed. In this paper we describe a novel methodology for ranking Internet domains based on DNS rather than on HTTP traffic. The advantage is that by analysing a limited amount of traffic it is possible to create comprehensive rankings neither limited to HTTP traffic, nor based on monitoring data provided by Internet users. Although the proposed methodology is general, DNS traffic collected at ".it" ccTLD DNS domain servers has been used to validate this work on a large scale and create daily rankings of Italian Internet domains.