I was grilling over the source code to the SiteFinder webpage looking at the Omniture Javascript and noticed a comment containing the name of the server that handled the request. I wrote a little perl script to repeatedly hit the site, check the string for the server name, and track how many servers it sees.

At the time I wrote this script, I was seeing 2 pools of 30 servers on the West Coast and 2 pools of 30 servers on the East Coast. So, 120 servers in the US. And thats just for sitefinder.verisign.com.. Might be a separate pool for the initial HTTP redirect engine (sitefinder-idn.verisign.com). Both of the IPs are in the same ASN, but different subnets.

Here is the server counting script. When you run it "+" means it saw a new server, "." means it saw a server again, and SIGINT (ctrl-c) makes it stop and print out its report. When you start seeing mostly .'s, hit ctrl-c. Have a blast.

[U: Oh yeah, if they change the string it checks, this will not work.. ]

Perl script to count number of servers behind sitefinder.verisign.com