RFC 2517 (rfc2517) - Page 2 of 7

Building Directories from DNS: Experiences from WWWSeeker

RFC 2517             Building Directories from DNS         February 1999


   guessable name.

   There are two major problems here.  As the number of assigned names
   increases, it becomes more difficult to get an easily guessable name.
   Also, the TLD must be guessed as well as the name.  While many users
   just guess ".COM" as the "default" TLD today, there are many two-
   letter country code top-level domains in current use as well as other
   gTLDs (.NET, .ORG, and possibly .EDU) with the prospect of additional
   gTLDs in the future.  As the number of TLDs in general use increases,
   guessing gets more difficult.

   Between July 1996 and our shutdown in March 1998, the InterNIC
   Directory and Database Services project maintained the Netfind search
   engine [1] and the associated database that maps organization
   information to domain names. This database thus acted as the type of
   Internet directory that associates company names with domain names.
   We also built WWWSeeker, a system that used the Netfind database to
   find web sites associated with a given organization.  The experienced
   gained from maintaining and growing this database provides valuable
   insight into the issues of providing a directory service.  We present
   it here to allow future implementors to avoid some of the blind
   alleys that we have already explored.

2. Directory Population

2.1 What to do?

   There are two issues in populating a directory: finding all the
   domain names (building the skeleton) and associating those domains
   with entities (adding the meat).  These two issues are discussed
   below.

2.2 Building the skeleton

   In "building the skeleton", it is popular to suggest using a variant
   of a "tree walk" to determine the domains that need to be added to
   the directory.  Our experience is that this is neither a reasonable
   nor an efficient proposal for maintaining such a directory.  Except
   for some infrequent and long-standing DNS surveys [5], DNS "tree
   walks" tend to be discouraged by the Internet community, especially
   given that the frequency of DNS changes would require a new tree walk
   monthly (if not more often).  Instead, our experience has shown that
   data on allocated DNS domains can usually be retrieved in bulk
   fashion with FTP, HTTP, or Gopher (we have used each of these for
   particular TLDs).  This has the added advantage of both "building the
   skeleton" and "adding the meat" at the same time.  Our favorite
   method for finding a server that has allocated DNS domain information
   is to start with the list maintained at



Moats & Huber                Informational