We’re excited to share a major expansion to DNSArchive: a new Web Search feature that complements our existing DNS history service. With this new tool, users can now dig deeper into how websites are built and operated, not just how they resolve.
This addition makes DNSArchive more than just a DNS intelligence platform; it’s now a comprehensive web infrastructure observability tool. Whether you’re tracking vulnerabilities, monitoring web technologies, or investigating suspicious behavior, Web Search opens up new possibilities.
Why We Built This
We built DNSArchive to be a useful tool for anyone wanting to analyze how domains resolve; tracking A, AAAA, NS, TXT, and MX records over time. It’s often used for security forensics, asset attribution, and infrastructure mapping.
But domains are only part of the story. The way a website behaves at the HTTP layer—its server headers, CMS, and included files—reveals just as much, if not more. Many investigations require this kind of context.
So we built Web Search to bridge that gap.
What You Can Do with Web Search
The new Web Search feature lets you query metadata collected from crawled websites across the internet. This includes:
- Server headers (e.g.,
Apache/2.4.49,nginx,Cloudflare) - CMS and platform versions (e.g.,
WordPress 6.0,Drupal,PHP/5.2) - Linked assets like JavaScript, CSS, and image files
- Meta tags, including title, description, and more
- Internal and external links, allowing for infrastructure correlation
In short, we’re fingerprinting how websites are built and configured—something that’s extremely useful for tracking vulnerabilities, mapping common infrastructure, and discovering hidden relationships between seemingly unrelated sites.
Example Use Cases
You can now run freeform keyword-based queries to identify patterns across websites. Here are a few examples:
Find Outdated Software
Want to know which websites are still exposing old PHP versions?
https://dnsarchive.net/web-search?q=PHP/5.2This quickly identifies websites that might be running insecure environments—something attackers often automate.
Identify Shared Infrastructure
You can look for shared assets across different domains:
q=cdn.example.com/library.jsThis can reveal when multiple sites are served from the same CDN or backend, helpful for attribution or infrastructure mapping.
Monitor Technology Adoption
Interested in how widespread a certain CMS version is?
q=WordPress/6.0.3Use this to track adoption trends—or find slow adopters still clinging to legacy tech.
How Security and Network Teams Can Use It
The new Web Search layer is especially valuable for:
| Security Researchers | – Pinpoint outdated software versions vulnerable to known exploits – Track phishing campaigns using reused templates or libraries – Map adversary infrastructure through shared resources or headers |
| System Administrators & IT Ops | – Monitor your own web footprint and catch misconfigurations – Discover forgotten assets that are still online and potentially exposed – See how third-party services interact with your domains |
| OSINT & Threat Intelligence Analysts | – Link domains through overlapping content or technologies – Support attribution work using both DNS and web metadata – Build datasets for machine learning and research projects |
How It Works Behind the Scenes
Web Search is powered by a lightweight crawler that visits domains and records HTTP responses and embedded metadata. This information is stored alongside DNS history in our existing archive.
All queries are free-form and search across headers, server info, file names, and visible HTML clues. The system is still in beta, and we’ll be improving accuracy and coverage in the coming months.
The original DNS search engine remains untouched and continues to support:
- DNS record history
- Timeline-based filtering
- IPv4/IPv6 and authoritative name server tracking
Together, these two tools give you a multi-layer view of the internet’s infrastructure—something not many platforms offer in a single place.
This is an early beta release, and we’re eager to hear what works, what doesn’t, and what you’d like to see next. Feel free to reach out with suggestions or bug reports.
We’re building this for the community—researchers, defenders, educators, and the endlessly curious.