Hacker News Reader

Comment by Trung0246 | Hacker News Reader

Is there an anternative to the ranking? I don't know if sucs thing exist since everywhere I saw people keep mentioning alexa ranking...

View on HN

8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 must provide great data. It's not publicly available though.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/privacy/public-dns... (CloudFlare stores aggregated data)

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy (well, it's Google)

Cloudflare has Radar: https://radar.cloudflare.com/

My bad, it's pretty good. (except the map, which is very much this https://xkcd.com/1138/ )

I don't understand how apple.com can rank over youtube.com? In what way is apple a daily service that people must access? I guess some apple service that I don't use like music?

Just a guess, but Apple devices hit Apple services fairly regularly, each requiring a DNS lookup.

1.1.1.1 is Cloudflare's public DNS service.

Probably apple telemetry. At least some of the phoning home is done using apple.com as a domain so it can add up very quickly. If anything I'm surprised the top domains aren't just telemetry endpoints, but I guess telemetry is a good use case for bare IPs so it doesn't show up as much on DNS analytics.

Cloudflare only has access to DNS requests made to their resolvers, not the amount of bandwidth utilized (which would certainly push Netflix and YouTube up) or the number of requests made. They also have some vaguely defined fudge factors to their rankings.

To take a guess at why Apple is so high, I think bundling all of these together might help their rank:

- App store downloads

- iOS updates

- Apple TV+ streaming

- Services that iOS / tvOS / macOS devices utilize

- Apple Music / iTunes downloads

- iCloud (including Private Relay and related traffic)

- push notifications (APNs)

Almost every Apple device is constantly connected to these servers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Push_Notification_servic...

According to NextDNS my MacBooks talks constantly with some apple.com subdomains. Some are blocked by NextDNS for privacy reasons.

Isn't it the default homepage on Safari? A few years since I've used a Macbook, but I thought it was.

Interesting how Tiktok is so high (#1).

How did openjsf.org get in the top 20? Script includes?

Sounds like those would provide rather biased samples because changing your DNS server from whatever you get from your ISP via DHCP is something that approximately no normal person would ever do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Similarweb

Commented above, but OpenDNS (Cisco Umbrella) has a similar top listing: http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/umbrella-static/index.html

Tranco is widely used in academia and open, though it is an aggregation of other rankings.

Majestic is the first one that comes to mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com