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Ask HN: How can we track registrar transfers?

4 points by studentrob ↗ HN
HN! I don't know who else to ask..

Would it be possible to track conversions from godaddy to other registrars so we could recognize those sites?

The idea being to celebrate any domain that transfers away from them and the date on which they did it.

The closest thing I found is a reverse DNS lookup: http://www.domaintools.com/research/reverse-whois/

In the search box, put: "Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC." Unfortunately, there are two problems. 1) the results are not displayed because there are > 100k and 2) the history is not tracked.

Is there another tool out there that has such stats?

I want to take a snapshot of everyone who uses GoDaddy right now but can't figure out a good way other than querying via the whois command line tool, and for 5 million records, that would take awhile.

Thoughts?

6 comments

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cd34
Verisign has a program where you can apply to get access to the zone files. It was called TLD Zone Access or something similar. You had to tell them why you wanted the data, fill in the paperwork, and then they would authorize an IP and key to download the .com zone file (as well as a few others).

Barring that, zfbot.com used to allow access to the data, but, appears to have turned into a drop reseller and wrapped an interface around it.

You could go to someone like netcraft who has access and propose your idea, possibly get access to their copy and publish it.

studentrob
Thank you cd34! This definitely points me in the right direction. I had never heard of any of this, I'll drop Netcraft a note.
studentrob
I sent an email to Netcraft, we'll see if they get back to me. I'll also apply to get access to the TLD zone files from verisign.
there
transferring registrars does not change dns server information, so unless a domain is using godaddy's dns servers, nothing would get updated in the gtld zone when a domain transfers.

you would need access to the whois data.

studentrob
is there anyplace to get such whois data in bulk?
studentrob
Yup you were right. After applying to get access to the zone files, I received this response,

"TLD Zone files do not show transfers between registrars. The zone files only provide current domains that are in OK status with their status of OK as well as the nameservers that are attached. It does not provide domains that are not in the zone."

The only way I found to get the whole database is through the whois API, which costs way too much for a novelty project - http://whoisxmlapi.com/#/whois-database-download.php?rid=2

Besides, someone already made a simpler implementation of the concept I was going for, and it serves the purpose well enough -- http://byedaddy.org/