Verisign has asked us for some feedback about their new Data Analyzer tool. For those of you that use it, could you tell us what you use Data Analyzer for. And if you find Data Analyzer to be useful to you.
Also, could you suggest any ways to improve Data Analyzer. A link to this thread will be sent to Verisign management.
Positive: It allows you to take a large list of domains and determine which domains receive absolutely NO traffic at all (all columns have zeros) and discard them. This makes it a somewhat useful tool to have.
To improve the service, which is necessary for it to be worthwhile, they need to filter out known robot requests/IPs from the results.
I have tested the raw traffic these domains receive as well and domains with straight 10s are not getting double the traffic of domains with straight 5s. The data is incredibly inaccurate and its relativity is skewed. This needs tremendous work to be more consistent and accurate.
If you are assigning traffic a score, United States traffic should be given more than foreign traffic. I much rather have a domain which receives 1 US visit a day than 10 foreign visits.
Broaden the scale. 0 through 10 is not large enough to distinctively assign a score to every domain! Let's say the scale is 1-100, then a score of 100 should be in the traffic range of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. 0 should be no traffic. And then based off the traffic, it should fall accordingly on the scale. A score of 50 would be around 4000 visitors a month or ~140 a day. Pick an intelligent median and the rest is simple.
I agree that actual NXDOMAIN data would be much more useful. These scores are ambiguous and useless. I have processed around 10 million domains using this tool and registered a couple hundred. I've found it to be rather useless. It tends to be the domains in the middle score range are better than the ones with straight 10's in every column. I have been playing with this tool since it was released and still play with it, trying to find some correlation between the data it provides and quality trafficked domains. My opinion is that the tool is no where near accurate enough to be useful.
I have used the Data Analyzer as well but on a mush smaller level than the poster above. I not noticed a correlation between the scores and actual traffic.
I would assume the Data Analyzer scores are based on NXDOMAIN responses. Would it be possible to get the actual NXDOMAIN data instead of "scores"?