Incoming links: Common Crawl
So far, no new domains have been found with Common Crawl, nor have any existing known domains been found to be present in Common Crawl. Our working theory is that Common Crawl never reached the domains How did Alexa find the domains?
Let's try and do something with Common Crawl.
Unfortunately there's no IP data apparently: github.com/commoncrawl/cc-index-table/issues/30, so let's focus on the URLs.
Using their Common Crawl Athena method: commoncrawl.org/2018/03/index-to-warc-files-and-urls-in-columnar-format/
Hello world:Data scanned: 11.75 MB
select * from "ccindex"."ccindex" limit 100;Sample first output line:So
# 2
url_surtkey org,whwheelers)/robots.txt
url https://whwheelers.org/robots.txt
url_host_name whwheelers.org
url_host_tld org
url_host_2nd_last_part whwheelers
url_host_3rd_last_part
url_host_4th_last_part
url_host_5th_last_part
url_host_registry_suffix org
url_host_registered_domain whwheelers.org
url_host_private_suffix org
url_host_private_domain whwheelers.org
url_host_name_reversed
url_protocol https
url_port
url_path /robots.txt
url_query
fetch_time 2021-06-22 16:36:50.000
fetch_status 301
fetch_redirect https://www.whwheelers.org/robots.txt
content_digest 3I42H3S6NNFQ2MSVX7XZKYAYSCX5QBYJ
content_mime_type text/html
content_mime_detected text/html
content_charset
content_languages
content_truncated
warc_filename crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-25/segments/1623488519183.85/robotstxt/CC-MAIN-20210622155328-20210622185328-00312.warc.gz
warc_record_offset 1854030
warc_record_length 639
warc_segment 1623488519183.85
crawl CC-MAIN-2021-25
subset robotstxturl_host_3rd_last_part might be a winner for CGI comms fingerprinting!Naive one for one index:have no results... data scanned: 5.73 GB
select * from "ccindex"."ccindex" where url_host_registered_domain = 'conquermstoday.com' limit 100;Let's see if they have any of the domain hits. Let's also restrict by date to try and reduce the data scanned:Humm, data scanned: 60.59 GB and no hits... weird.
select * from "ccindex"."ccindex" where
fetch_time < TIMESTAMP '2014-01-01 00:00:00' AND
url_host_registered_domain IN (
'activegaminginfo.com',
'altworldnews.com',
...
'topbillingsite.com',
'worldwildlifeadventure.com'
)Sanity check:has a bunch of hits of course. Also Data scanned: 212.88 MB,
select * from "ccindex"."ccindex" WHERE
crawl = 'CC-MAIN-2013-20' AND
subset = 'warc' AND
url_host_registered_domain IN (
'google.com',
'amazon.com'
)WHERE crawl and subset are a must! Should have read the article first.Let's widen a bit more:Still nothing found... they don't seem to have any of the URLs of interest?
select * from "ccindex"."ccindex" WHERE
crawl IN (
'CC-MAIN-2013-20',
'CC-MAIN-2013-48',
'CC-MAIN-2014-10'
) AND
subset = 'warc' AND
url_host_registered_domain IN (
'activegaminginfo.com',
'altworldnews.com',
...
'worldnewsandent.com',
'worldwildlifeadventure.com'
)It can't be HTML crawl because presumably there wouldn't have been links to those websites? Presumably this is why Common Crawl doesn't seem to have any hits.
So they must have had some kind of DNS A record database?
Or would IPv4 sweep have worked, without the
Host header with the CIA's setup?The same question also applies to the 2013 DNS Census. It has less hits, but still has many.
Whatever they did, we are so so glad that they did!
D'oh.
But to be serious. The Wayback Machine contains a very large proportion of all sites. It is the most complete database we have found so far. Some archives are very broken. But those are rares.
The only problem with the Wayback Machine is that there is no known efficient way to query its archives across domains. You have to have a domain in hand for CDX queries: Wayback Machine CDX scanning.
The Common Crawl project attempts in part to address this lack of querriability, but we haven't managed to extract any hits from it.
CDX + 2013 DNS Census + heuristics however has been fruitful however.