Lieferando.de (Takeaway) Has Captured 5.7% of Restaurant-Related Domain Names

I recently embarked on a fascinating project to compile an extensive list of domain names for the German country code top-level domain .de. Leveraging the free, open repository of web crawl data and web graphs provided by the Common Crawl project, I was able to gather a list of roughly 9 million .de domain names using just a few command line commands and a small bash shell script.

While the resulting list is by no means complete or up-to-date, it can serve as a valuable starting point for further analysis and investigations. One aspect that piqued my interest was the representation of restaurant-related domains within this vast list. To narrow down the scope, I employed a simple yet effective method: filtering domain names based on German words indicative of eating places.

Due to the constraints of running this analysis on my Windows desktop, I had to rely on alternative tools instead of grep. Consequently, I utilized the findstr PowerScript command to achieve this filtering. The result was still impressive, yielding approximately 31,000 domain names related to German restaurants.

Given that the original list is inherently outdated, I needed to verify which domain names remained active. My initial attempt at doing so employed a PowerShell script, which worked in principle but left me feeling somewhat uncertain about its capabilities and speed. To overcome these limitations, I created a small Golang program, taking advantage of its concurrency features.

With the Golang program in hand, I was able to manually spot-check 20,000 restaurant domain names from my list. During this process, two observations emerged that left an indelible mark on me: Firstly, many excellent domain names were indeed "parked," which came as no surprise. However, another discovery caught my attention - the domains captured by lieferando.de did not redirect to their official website but instead showcased their logo and provided a link to their actual site.

Fortunately, with a minor extension to my Golang program, I was able to locate all 1101 domain names from the initial list that were captured by lieferando.de. This staggering figure represents approximately 5.7% of the active domains in our restaurant-related list, a truly eye-opening statistic.

It is essential to note that these numbers are mere estimates due to the incompleteness of the original domain list. Nevertheless, they provide an intriguing glimpse into the scope and scale of this phenomenon. Preliminary analysis via WHOIS entries for some domain names suggests that lieferando.de's "capturing" of restaurant-related domains began even before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 and may have continued until at least 2022.

While I have not yet conducted a systematic analysis, these findings raise essential questions about the motivations behind this widespread phenomenon and its potential implications for the food industry and online marketplaces. As I continue to explore this topic further, one thing is certain - lieferando.de's impressive domain capture rate will undoubtedly be a subject of much interest and debate in the coming weeks.