Domain traffic ranking

• US 8,527,658 B2
• Filed: 10/30/2009
• Issued: 09/03/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 04/07/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: VeriSign, Inc.
• Original Assignee: VeriSign, Inc.
• Inventors: Holmes, Alexander D., Simpson, Andrew W., Shyamsunder, Karthik, Sunkara, Srinivas, Orentas, Leonard, Kosters, Mark, Moston, Dave, Jimenez, Eduardo, Pattapu, Phani
• Primary Examiner(s): Troung, Lan-Dai T
• Application Number:
  US12/609,815
• Publication Number:
  US 20100257024A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,404 Days
• Field of Search: 709/245, 709/223, 709/230, 709/224, 709/218, 709/220
• US Class Current: 709/245
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/00 Commerce
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0273 Determination of fees for advertising
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0277 Online advertisement
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0282 Rating or review of business operators or products
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/04 Processing captured monitoring data, e.g. for logfile generation
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/062 related to network traffic
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 61/4511 using domain name system [DNS]

Abstract

An automated method for determining domain traffic including receiving at authoritative name server a request to resolve a domain name that has n labels separated by periods. The leftmost label is the first label and the top level domain is the nth label. If the first label of the received domain name includes the string “www”, then a www hit counter and/or a www requesting server counter for the domain name are incremented. If the received domain name has only two labels, then an exact hit counter and/or an exact requesting server counter for the domain name are incremented. If the first label of the received domain name does not include the string “www” and does not have only two labels, then another hit counter and/or another requesting server counter for the domain name are incremented. A domain traffic score is calculated based upon a plurality of the counters, and calculating the domain traffic score includes applying a weighting factor to at least one of the counters.

Claims

1. An automated method for determining Internet domain traffic, comprising:

receiving at an authoritative name server a plurality of requests to resolve an Internet domain name, at least two of the plurality of requests having a different number of labels for the Internet domain name separated by periods;

incrementing, at the authoritative name server, a plurality of counters based on the plurality of requests, at least two of the counters separately counting the at least two requests; and

calculating a domain traffic score based upon the plurality of counters.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein at least one of the plurality of counters has a limit of one counter per predetermined period of time.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

calculating a rank of a domain corresponding to the Internet domain name; and

providing the rank to a user as part of a fee service.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

calculating a rank of a domain corresponding to the Internet domain name;

calculating an advertising value for the domain based on the rank; and

providing the advertising value to a user upon request.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein, calculating the domain traffic score includes applying a weighting factor to at least one of the plurality of counters.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the leftmost label is the first label and the top level domain is the nth label.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein if a first label of the received Internet domain name includes the string “

www”

, then incrementing a www counter of the plurality of counters for the Internet domain name;

if the received domain name has only two labels, then incrementing an exact counter of the plurality of counters for the Internet domain name;

if the first label of the received Internet domain name does not include the string “

www” and

does not have only two labels, then incrementing another counter for the Internet domain name.

8. The method of claim 7, wherein calculating the domain traffic score comprises:

calculating an average daily ratio for each of the counters according to;

9. The method of claim 8, wherein W_W=1, W_E=0.5 and W_O=0.2.