FAQ

What is Profundis?

Profundis is a search engine which focuses on indexing hosts rather than web pages. You may use it to discover new assets or get alerts when a new host which matches specific criteria is discovered.

Can I try it for free?

Yes. You don't even need an account. Just run a hosts search. The free plan allows you to run multiple searches every day. If you used all your free tier quota, come back tomorrow or check our subscription plans.

Can I use the API for free?

Yes. However, unlike the web UI, you will need to create an account and then generate an API token.

How does the alerting feature work?

You can create alert tasks to be informed when a new host is discovered and ingested in our dataset for the first time. You only receive alerts for new assets. If the host was already known by Profundis, you won't receive any alert.

The alerts are sent immediately when the host is ingested. Read the doc for more information

Where does the data come from?

The data available on profundis.io is retrieved from various public sources (internet archives, other search engines, public DNS data, CT, IANA, etc) and then enriched using basic information (web title, headers, response status code, etc) when Profundis indexing robots navigate to the asset.

Are the statistics you display real?

The statistics you see on the hosts and DNS pages are real. However, the ingest rate represents the assets being refreshed, and not only the ones being created in our search engine.

The database size is the total amount of storage needed to store the data. Its value may sometimes go down as we are constantly optimizing and compressing the data to keep its size as small as possible while maintaining good search performance.

What is the difference between "hosts" and "DNS"?

The hosts search returns assets we detected as being reachable.

The DNS search returns all the DNS records we detected for any host. Some of them may not be used anymore.

How often is the data refreshed?

There is no specific refresh frequency. The assets are permanently discovered and ingested in the search engine. You can see the indexing rate here for the hosts and here for the DNS. On average, we ingest approximately between 15 and 25 million hosts per day and twice as many for DNS, but it can vary from one day to another. These statistics represent the number of assets being refreshed, not only the new ones.

How long is the data kept?

Indefinitely. We don't delete any data. However, as this is a relatively recent tool, you may not find a lot of old data.

You say the host has an open port but I cannot connect

This could be explained by two main reasons:

• The host was found a long time ago and may not be exposed anymore on the internet. You can see the date when the asset was scanned at the right top of the result cards.
• We use dozens of servers located all around the world, so the host may only be reachable from a specific country / location (see the route53 geolocation routing doc for instance).

I received an alert but the host is not visible in the search UI

The alerts are sent exactly when the host is ingested in our search engine and detected as new. To preserve good performance, the data is inserted by batches approximately every 3-4 minutes and may then not be searchable immediately.

How intrusive are the Profundis indexing robots?

We do not attempt any data injection, authentication, or use any advanced analysis techniques. We just perform extremely basic requests on the asset to gather minimal information (status code, web title, headers, etc).

Why can't I access the service as a free / basic plan user?

In case of maintenance or service disruptions on our primary infrastructure, your trafic may be automatically rerouted to a secondary datacenter. When it happens, the higher subscription plans requests have priority over the lower subscription plans users. Also, the access to the service may be blocked for all the free plan users and optionnally the basic users.

Do you store any personal data?

We use only the most essential personal data (e.g. to process payments). We log the requests received by our services and they contain your IP address and user agent. We use Firebase to manage our user authentication. Your email and name are stored only on Firebase. Our local database only stores your Firebase user ID. See the privacy policy for more information.

Do you analyze the queries I make?

See this page. We try to be as transparent as we can.

Can you remove my website from the search results?

Yes. See this page for instructions.

Note: If your site is publicly accessible when it shouldn't be, review your security configuration immediately.

What payment methods do you accept?

The payments are handled by Stripe. We accept payments through debit and credit cards, PayPal, and many other methods. You can get more information about the subscription in our doc.

Can I cancel or change my subscription?

Yes. You can change your subscription whenever you want. Subscription creations or upgrades are effective as soon as we receive the payment confirmation. The subscription downgrades or cancellations are effective at the end of your billing cycle. You can see more information here.

Can I request new features or provide feedback?

Yes! Feel free to make suggestions or tell us what you think here.