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Infoseek-GO Spider Codes Debunked
------------------------------------------------------
by
Dirk Brockhausen
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Many Infoseek spiders originate from hosts
that seem to bear a cryptic string of characters in
their domain names, e.g. cca26101.infoseek.com,
cca26111.infoseek.com, cca261e7.infoseek.com, etc.

While this may seem somewhat weird at first glance,
there is an underlying logic to it which can be
discerned when viewing the third level domain in
context with their original IP.

Let's review this using the following entry pair as a
practical example:

cca26101.infoseek.com - 204.162.97.1

The string "cca26101" is made up of 8 (i.e. 4 x 2)
characters:

cc|a2|61|01.

These twin characters can be converted to integers.
Note that to do this we will not be working the decimal
system here but, rather, the hexadecimal system which
is based on 16.
Within this system, the following assignments hold
true:

0 : 0
1 : 1
2 : 2
3 : 3
4 : 4
5 : 5
6 : 6
7 : 7
8 : 8
9 : 9
a : 10
b : 11
c : 12
d : 13
e : 14
f : 15

Based on this table, we can convert the twin
characters easily as follows:

cc : 12 x 16 + 12 = 192 + 12 = 204
a2 : 10 x 16 + 2 = 160 + 2 = 162
61 : 6 x 16 + 1 = 96 + 1 = 97
01 : 0 x 16 + 1 = 0 + 1 = 1

The base being 16, it is with 16 that the values
have to be multiplied.

Merging these results, we obtain:

204.162.97.1

This is identical with the IP of
cca26101.infoseek.com.

Let's take two more examples to illustrate that we
are not dealing with mere numerological coincidence
here.

cca261e7.infoseek.com - 204.162.97.231

cc : 12 x 16 + 12 = 192 + 12 = 204
a2 : 10 x 16 + 2 = 160 + 2 = 162
61 : 6 x 16 + 1 = 96 + 1 = 97
e7 : 14 x 16 + 7 = 224 + 7 = 231

Result: 204.162.97.231.

cde2ccee.infoseek.com 205.226.204.238

cd : 12 x 16 + 13 = 192 + 13 = 205
e2 : 14 x 16 + 2 = 224 + 2 = 226
cc : 12 x 16 + 12 = 192 + 12 = 204
ee : 14 x 16 + 14 = 224 + 14 = 238

Result: 205.226.204.238

The lowest value would be 00000000.infoseek.com,
the highest ffffffff.infoseek.com.

This equates to IPs 0.0.0.0 and 255.255.255.255
respectively - which are, of course, the limits
of any IP range.

Thus, what may seem like utter nonsense to the
uneducated eye, is shown to be a sequence of 4
integer blocks representing the spider's IP address.

This text may freely be republished or distributed in unmodified form provided the following resource box is included intact either at the beginning or the end of the article and a complimentary copy or notice (link) is sent to the author at the address specified below:

Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < http://fantomaster.com/ >, a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services.

He has been a web marketer since 1994 and is editor-in-chief of fantomNews, a free newsletter focusing on search engine optimization, available at: < http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html > You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com
(c) copyright 2002 by fantomaster.com
All rights reserved.
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