A Complete List of .Gov Domains | Hacker News Reader

A Complete List of .Gov Domains

18f.gsa.gov

84 pointskonklone16 comments

For some extra clarification: this is the official list, as released by the General Services Administration, the part of the government that runs the registry.

Some of these -- the domains for the federal government's executive branch -- were already public. This includes the rest of the federal government (e.g. Congress, the courts), as well as all the .gov's in states, territories, counties, cities, and native tribes.

There's about 5,300 of them.

I can't imagine when I'll ever need this list but it will be nice to have it in my documents folder.

I can't imagine why you'd ever maintain such a large and arbitrary set of documents.

I'd imagine I'm pretty similar to grandparent post in this respect. If I find something interesting, I save it. Even if it's seemingly arbitrary or not immediately useful. With powerful search and tagging it's nice to run a query/update to a personal archive to refresh my memory, browse when bored, catalogue sources, wishfully think about future study, notice patterns in my interests over time, meta-analysis, etc.

More cynically, I've noticed that it's a relatively benign form of hoarding. i.e. I get the quick dopamine rush of "oh this is interesting, now I have it" without, say, crowding up my living space with trinkets. With an abundance of storage that is essentially invisible to me when I don't want to think about it, I can keep what I want, when I want; often while fully aware that I'll never look at most items individually again. I think of it as a kludgey form of external memory / internet butterfly collecting. The only downsides I've thought of are: time frittered revisiting archives, the (small) transaction cost of tagging and placing items into the archive, and the externalized costs of maintaining the hardware.

I wish they went down to the third level domains. A state I am familiar with has a hard time tracking domains down, as there are several entities authorized to request then.

Most likely, the .gov registry delegates the second levels, and has no idea what is used at the third level.

This reminds me when I was toying with some grey hat SEO tactics 10 years ago or so, one of which consisted in finding .GOV and .MIL sites with a redirection page to an external site.

The trick was to find pages like somesite.gov/redirect.asp?target=http://yoursite.com&text=Awesome+Site that would then display a link with custom anchor to your site, and supposedly getting benefit from the .GOV or .MIL Google juice.

It was quite trivial to set up dozens of those links (didn't really bothered to get real measure of the google juice benefit, though)

I think "grey hat" is probably overstating how legitimate hijacking other people's redirectors to send Google juice to your site actually is.

I'm actually surprised at this action with the recent rash of actions by cracker collectives like Anonymous aimed at local and national governments.

However, I do appreciate the transparency.

I guess some of the interesting things you might be able to do include analyzations like !) What states counties have more .gov websites for their municipal functions 2) What states counties have the most disparity in municipal function websites

There's probably some interesting things you could ascertain from this data set given a weekend and some drive.

There are some real stinkers in that list, the ones so long that it's difficult to imagine you getting where you're trying to go:

WINNEMUCCAINDIANCOLONYOFNEVADA-NSN.GOV

FLORIDASORTHOTISTSPROSTHETISTS.GOV

PALMBEACHCOUNTYTAXCOLLECTOR-FL.GOV

The funny thing is, the last one redirects to "PBCTAX.COM", which makes me wonder why they bothered in the first place.

maybe they just bought it after a scamming/domain squatting used that name?

it's also on github

https://github.com/GSA/data/blob/gh-pages/dotgov-domains/201...

(you'll notice the fancy CSV viewing UI on github)

I believe this document is the first public acknowledgement on the government side of the relationship that the Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the University of Maryland is an NSA facility. Even the agencies own NSA.gov domain is listed as controlled by the "Department of Defense."

Might not be that uncommon. The University of Alaska, Fairbanks supercomputing center is DoD funded. In return for 25% academic timeshare on the system the university hosts and runs the actual facility.

The second Google result for "Laboratory for Physical Sciences" for me is an NSA article stating that it's an NSA facility - it's hardly a secret.

"Even the agencies own NSA.gov domain is listed as controlled by the 'Department of Defense.'"

That's because the NSA is a part of the Department of Defense.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

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