Google Subdomains and the Two Hour PHP Script
Recently base.google.com was stumbled upon by a few people who were predicting some sort of Google database service. This got me thinking. Google could have a lot of subdomains we don’t know about. If they don’t announce it, why would we check?
Well, I say, why not? So I called up my good friend Nick Santos, who provided me with a MySQL database of about 68,500 dictionary words. I then wrote a quick little PHP script to check for subdomains using each word. I uploaded the script, started it going and waited. For two hours. When it was finished I realized that the dictionary didn’t have plural words. So I added an ’s’ in front of every word and started it up again.
So what are the results? Well, nothing too groundbreaking to say the least. I didn’t find any new services or features. But I did find some subdomains or rather lot of them 83 to be exact. Here are the annotated results (raw results list here):
The Interesting Subdomains
publisher, calendar, wire, fusion, protocol
These I find interesting, because although these domains either time out or forward to Google Search, their names seem like they could become something significant in the future. The best example and most likely candidate for a future service I think is publisher.google.com, which could be Google’s resource for publisher to aid in the Google Print project.
Perhaps calendar.google.com will be Google’s calendar service an extention of Google Alerts. Maybe protocol.google.com will soon give us Google Protocol: a new way to transfer files. I’m most likely wrong, but it’s always fun to speculate.
The Continent Subdomains
america, asia, europe
I think that these are simply where Google lives on these specific continents. They each forward the user to Google. It’s easier to retrieve a page that lives closer to you than further away. I could also be where the Google workers in these areas store and test their stuff.
The Three Letter Somewhat Rhyming Subdomains
amp, gap, jam, lag, nag, mad, opt, paw, vat
Most of these subdomains put the user onto a secure server, but can’t actually find a web page associated with it so the user gets a can’t connect error. This leads me to believe that these are various company databases, which may hold internal documents or user information of some sort.
The Admin and Tech Related Domains
console, proxy, ns
Theses are the Google Search Administration Console, the Google proxy server and the Google Name Server, respectively. It’s no surprise these exist, but nevertheless cool to find them.
The Odd Domains
virgin, ratings, ignite, gnome, federation, dexter, d, w, services, sandbox
These domains provided very odd results or are just weird by means of existing (virgin.google.com, I’m looking at you). And if that isn’t odd enough services.google.com actually takes the user to a grey page with yellow writing that says “This space intentionally left blank”. Figure that one out.
The Leftovers
Other than that I found a lot of alternative domains to current Google servics, like map and maps.
All around this was a fun experiment, though I was hoping to find something new and obtain a few moments fame. I guess some people are just lucky with those type of things. I guess I’ll just have to run the script again in a month or two and see if that lucky guy can be me.