Organizations committed to becoming a leader in the Web filtering market need to provide adequate and secure Web access, which applies to unified threat management (UTM) appliance manufacturers, managed detection and response (MDR) service providers, or any other network security vendor.

For a security provider, the protection of users is critical to success. Any vendor should be aware of the nature of online threats that include malware, botnets, and more. Since threats are continually evolving, a successful provider needs to offer a product or service that exceeds clients' expectations.

Two critical elements of an ideal filtering solution are its domain database and classification technology. These enable users to distinguish good traffic from bad. Therefore, to improve their Web filtering capabilities cybersecurity companies need the help of a reliable third-party provider.

In this post, we listed the essential considerations when evaluating potential website categorization technology partners.

Coverage

Coverage is an essential quality indicator when evaluating a website categorization database. Comprehensive coverage means that a provider has a system that monitors even the most recently launched websites.

Protecting customers against malicious threats requires a solution that covers the entire top-level domain (TLD) space. Although Web filtering and categorization tools don’t actively detect malicious code or quarantine malware, they still help identify and block access to threat sources before they can cause damage. A filtering solution that isn't expansive enough won’t be able to serve as a good data source.

Performance and Speed

Performance and speed are also crucial to a website categorization API. A vendor that wants to become a Web filtering market leader should enable users to run shorter, more focused tests on questionable sites for quick results. They should, however, also be able to conduct longer tests for local software development kits (SDKs) or APIs. In any network, traffic flows at different speeds and only a solution that can cope with these can be considered adequate.

Accuracy

Accuracy is the primary indicator that separates the best website categorization technologies from the rest. Vendors claiming an accuracy rate of 99% or more are confident that their product is finely tuned for service. Validating a tool's accuracy with manual verification is a good test. Companies should choose a vendor that confidently claims a high accuracy rating.

Additional Considerations

Besides the parameters mentioned above, here are other things to consider when choosing a website categorization partner:

• Number of categories supported: The higher the number of unique categories supported by the product, the better its filtering capabilities are.
• Threat detection: Website categorization APIs should be capable of detecting malicious activity. Since threat life spans vary, continuous analysis and reevaluation are needed to stay abreast of status changes.
• Supported languages: A web filtering technology provider that supports various languages is essential due to the global nature of the Internet.

What WhoisXML API Offers

WhoisXML API provides cybersecurity companies with a machine learning (ML)-based website categorization API. It is capable of retrieving website content and assign categories using natural language processing. The company parses more than 152 million websites and crawls 4 million sites daily.

Besides domain names, users can also find the contact information of the owners in the database. This data includes the domain registrant’s name and contact details, along with dates of registration and expiration, and more. A reliable database contains information on all active domains. Users don’t need to do manual queries as such since the API does that for them.

The product currently supports 25 categories, which should be more than enough for most users. However, if a particular category isn’t listed, users are free to submit requests.

All of the information provided by the API are normalized and follow a standard format. Users can acquire both parsed and raw databases through downloads. Databases can come in the form of database dumps or CSV files. This allows for easy integration with existing business applications and processes.

The API can help teams block access to malicious content and its sources. It does so by providing security solutions with response queries that categorize URLs as safe to access or otherwise. It also performs well even under heavy load.

In a nutshell, our web categorization products can help users improve their own cybersecurity.

The characteristics mentioned above are just some of the things a company needs to consider when choosing a Web filtering partner.

It’s important to remember that no solution is foolproof. Not all providers are equally good and some are certainly better than others as the former use more advanced technologies and tools. What’s important is finding a website categorization partner that best meets your needs.

WhoisXML API's website categorization offerings may be what you need to enrich your products' capabilities. We have been gathering domain and website records for more than 10 years, accounting for our vast data set. If you want to learn more about our products, contact us at