A Long Way to the Top
Quirin Scheitle, Oliver Hohlfeld, Julien Gamba, Jonas Jelten, Torsten Zimmermann, Stephen D. Strowes, Narseo Vallina-Rodríguez · 2018
A broad range of research areas including Internet measurement, privacy, and network security rely on lists of target domains to be analysed; researchers make use of target lists for reasons of necessity or efficiency. The popular Alexa list of one million domains is a widely used example. Despite their prevalence in research papers, the soundness of top lists has seldom been questioned by the community: little is known about the lists' creation, representativity, potential biases, stability, or overlap between lists.