How would I / could I obtain an reasonably comprehensive list of domain names?

Posted by Simon on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Simon
Published on 2010-04-08T13:49:48Z Indexed on 2010/04/08 14:23 UTC
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I know that domain names are constantly changing, and I know there are a lot of them, but there is clearly a region of the domain name space which is stable. How would I go about getting a list, even a very big one?

Such a thing must logically exist, even if it is in a distributed form, because the web's DNS servers resolve names to IP addresses. So in theory if I could poll all the DNS servers in the world at a moment in time I would have the complete list of mapped names. Is there a practical way of doing that?

As an aside, does anyone have any good estimates of how many domain names exist at the moment?

How would I / could I obtain an reasonably comprehensive list of domain names?

Posted by Simon on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Simon
Published on 2010-04-08T13:49:48Z Indexed on 2010/04/08 13:53 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 411

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dns

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domain-name

I know that domain names are constantly changing, and I know there are a lot of them, but there is clearly a region of the domain name space which is stable. How would I go about getting a list, even a very big one?

Such a thing must logically exist, even if it is in a distributed form, because the web's DNS servers resolve names to IP addresses. So in theory if I could poll all the DNS servers in the world at a moment in time I would have the complete list of mapped names. Is there a practical way of doing that?

As an aside, does anyone have any good estimates of how many domain names exist at the moment?

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