The Domain Census

Okay, what is the domain census? It searches for the percentage of pages in seven TLDs (biz, net, org, info, gov, com, and edu) which contain a given keyword. Why? I dunno why. I just thought of it after thinking about Rael Dornfest's Googleshare idea and seeing something on WebmasterWorld about whether or not Google indexes the less- popular TLDs (they do.)

Query:

Please use your Google API key here if you have one!

Please use your own key! Every time this script runs it burns 14 key-uses. So please use your own key. If you get a blank page or an error when you run this hack, the key's probably run out. If you get straight 0% results and the response that domain:fred has the highest percentage, you searched on a "stop word." put a + in front of it.

This hack is not meant to be scientific, only amusing.
Some notes:

1 . The program gets the first number -- the total number of pages for a given TLD -- by running the query site:$tld -sghagwegxx. This is inaccurate, but it's the only way I know to get a number (well, you can do site:$tld inurl:$tld, but it provides much lower numbers and doesn't work for com and edu domains.) That's why this is amusing and not scientific. :->

The program then searches for the query term in the same domain ($query site:$tld) then calculates the percentage ($querytermnumber / $firstnumber * 100) and Bjorn Stronginthearm's your uncle.

2. If you run the search for queries that have a couple of results for a domain, you'll get odd-looking result percentages, like this:

1.17302052785924e-05%

The final calculation that determines the TLD with the highest percentage still works, though.

3. Cultural queries are more fun. For example, 0.000178372352285396% of gov pages returned by this search method contain the phrase "all your base are belong to us." Some words are clearly domain-specific; 7.75956284153005% of edu pages returned by this search method contain the word syllabus.

I'm still goofing around with this. I think I'm going to add an option to search English- speaking TLD's (us, uk, ca, etc.) and some sets of worldwide TLDs. Send me feedback if something doesn't work.

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