Slashdot Mirror
The Google Effect And Domain Name Speculation
A reader writes "Google brought us the age of high quality searches, and with that may come the end of domain-name speculation. Good thing we paid for all those laws to punish cyber-squatters. Read the article and learn more."
I mean, "the Google effect"?
I think the most likely cause of the shrinking market for domain names is simply the internet bubble bursting - it's been clearly shown that such trivialities as domain names (among other things internet-related) are of dubious real value.
And as for Google searching, while I'm happily using it as my primary search engine, it's by no means perfect, and the author claiming that Google is an example of "search tools that unerringly bring you to the page you want" is total nonsense. I suppose your odds might be better than typing in a domain name blindly, but I'm not so sure.
If I'm looking for a company, I always try the domain name directly *first*, and only after (and if) that fails do I use Google. Seems to work most of the time.
Google is a wonderful tool, but there are times and situations were it fails. Its at its very best at [say] finding every article ever written on a line like 'ORA12345 Oracle', as there is only one possible meaning. It is weaker however when one wants to buy something, because often people have only partialy defined needs for what they want to buy before they engage in the buying process.
A search of 'Bicycle shop UK' will produce many hits, almost all of them not online bicycle retailers. which is why bikes.co.uk will always have worth.
Now my own view is that all retail should be stuck on a separtate domain [.shop par example], and the rest returned to the 'good ol' days', but it aint going to happen
Seeking Search Engine Perfection
Well worth a read.
I agree with the article 100%. But I would go even further and think about Peer to Peer. Right now something like GnuTella is used for MP3's. But after having read the specifications I could see how GnuTella and google together could be absolutely cool.
For those wondering what GnuTella has to do with searching it lies in the protocol definition. Whereas most P2P search for filenames, GnuTella considers everything a search on a distributed network. Add some smart routine and replication and we have a killer network... Maybe this could topple Google
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Something I've been talking about for years is the concept of a "subject based directory." Pretty much all the web search engines work based on the content of a page, not the more abstract subject matter of the page. Some of the directories Google, Yahoo) get close to a good subject-based lookup, but they're not quite what I (think) I've been looking for.
What I'd like would be to go to a search engine, type in "ford," and get a list of websites, with a brief description of each. Not pages on a website, but a list of things like "Ford Automotive," "Ford Aerospace" (are they even still around?), "John Ford", "Ford's Theatre," etc. Maybe in decreasing order by some kind of popularity rating.
Or are the directories now pretty good at this kind of lookup? Google Directory did a passable job with "ford," but it's not well organized and still (apparently) takes its description information straight from the web page, rather than from a carefully crafted, entered-directly-into-the-directory abstract of the site. The "Realnames" service looks like it might have been a solution, but I think it's just moved the problem from a for-pay DNS issue to a for-pay keyword issue. (use "ford" there, and you get FordVehicles.com, no other choices).
This'd be easy enough to implement with some kind of meta tag, in which someone could place the legal and common name for their organization, or for the specific information on their site, along with a one-paragraph description. Search engines could then let people search against that "abstract" database.
Does this make sense? Is anyone doing anything like this (and I've just missed out, being under a rock)? Or are there big feasibility problems (like people stacking meta data) that I haven't addressed?
What I do believe is that adding additional TLDs, for the most part, will not help free up names. Currently companies will typically purcase theircompany.com, theircompany.net, and some even go as far as getting theircompany.org. If you start adding additional TLDs all it means is that companies will start buying theircomany.TLD, where TLD is the new TLD that is available to them.
This won't increase available names... it'll increase revenues to registrars that end up selling the same domain name in more TLDs, costing companies and other domain name owners more money.
whois 'google*' lists 50 records, including GOOGLE.COM, GOOGLE.NET, GOOGLE.ORG, GOOGLE4SEX.COM, GOOGLEA.COM, GOOGLEBAY.COM, many of which are blatantly for sale.
As google also bases its search on the domain name ...
The real danger is that Google already wields too much power on the web. Just like so many other companies that own the majority of the market.
All we need is for Google to start charging or dictating so change to us and they will be little different than ICAAN or Microsoft.
Scary.
IMHO, Google has lost its accuracy and its results lack relevance compared to the all-time-favourite Altavista (which I usually access the light way).
I just can't find the equivalent of Altavista's syntax on Google.
Need an example ?
Remember the hint that appeared in italics :
Need a bedtime story ?
Type : +Fairy +princ* -dragon
(note the wildcard use)
There are also lots of short ways to find which pages refer to one another (+link:...) or if you want to filter whichever result after a given url part (+url:...)
But, on the bottom, the guy is right, most people now ask Google first instead of looking for a funky domain name which sounds like what they'd enter in the Google form.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Notice that if you follow a broken URL in IE it goes to Microsofts search thing that will help you find what you are really looking for. How kind of them.
This helpful feature also sends along the URL you typed in, however. All Microsoft would have to do is run some algorithms through their collected data to figure out the most visited domains that don't exist and there is no more speculation needed.
Not that they need the money from the domains anyway though.
> although I also use opera and have configured it
:)
> such that I only have the google search box on my
> toolbar.
I have it set up too, but I never use it; it's easier just to type "g foo bar wibble" in a nearby address bar.
You can make IE do this too, btw; HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\g, set the default value to http://www.google.com/search?q=%s. Repeat for other search engines.
(Yeah, editing the registry for something like this.. I know.. bleugh
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
You'll find that the first page of results gives you a pretty good overview of who I am. One page is a project I ran while an undergraduate student; one page is a press release from my undergraduate university talking about me; one page is from an orchestra of which I was a member; one page is from Oxford's computing lab. I don't need to tell people my email address; they can find it very easily through the pages google provides.
All that is good and useful for me, but what of the other people (I know of three so far) who share my name? What if someone wants to contact them?
If we're going to rely upon Google to translate names into URLs, we're inevitably going to run into such problems, where only the most famous person/company using a name is brought up, even though some people will be searching for their lesser known isonyms.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
But what about the return visitor that isn't 100% sure of the domain name, but they can get close.
Slashdot is the perfect example. It appears to me that they have both slashdot.org and slashdot.com registered and pointing to the same machine. But supposing Slashdot didn't have the .com address registered. What's to prevent someone else from picking it up? As is the case with Orange Juice, a very respectable demoscene resource, someone registered ojuice.com several months ago, and turned it into a porn site, hoping that sceners might accidentally type .com instead of .org. I'm sure it worked for a while...but it pissed off a lot of sceners.
Things could've been worse. After all, someone could've registered slashdot.com -- and created a spoof site (using the open source slash code) with no purpose other than to blacken the name of the real slashdot. It might have useless articles about porn, out dated technology, and stupid shit like that. What would that do for slashdot?
Domain names are critical for so many reasons...
.EDU registration now, but with perhaps looser guidelines. To get an .EDU, you must be a "regionally-accredited, degree-granting institutions of higher education," among other things.
.COM or whatever, you only have to be able to type (and not even that). I might be wrong, but that seems to contribute to confuson on the web, and massive bloat in the dns databases. Why couldn't there have been at least some minimal requirement for getting a domain? Maybe you should have to be an actual licensed business or registered non-profit or something.
Well, yes, for legitimate business and other interests. But what about useless or misleading domain names?
Examples of the useless:
mycatfluffy.com
thedorkfamilyvacation.com
any of the nearly infinite variations on "pr0n" words: xxx, lesbian, suck, etc.
Examples of the misleading:
notmilk.com
notharvard.com (since litigated out of existence)
britneysucks.com
slahsdot.org (and all of the "mis-type" sites)
My point is this: domain name registration should long ago have been subjected to some sort of test for legitimacy, something like the
But to get a
I'm not trying to make the web corporate here, or keep individual voices off, but couldn't the Dork Family put their loser pictures up at "earthlink.net/thedorkfamily/vacation" or whatever? Why do they need a domain for that?
While I'm on it, here's a similar issue: why does every movie that comes out need it's own domain name? Is a movie really a "domain", the way domains were intended? As a business interest, for advertising, the film needs web exposure for maybe six months. But listen, The Siege wasn't even an average movie way back in 1998. Why does it still need to have a web presence with a stupid flash intro screen? Even if it needed a web presence at all, which it doesn't, couldn't it be done as "universal.com/thesiege" or something, the way Sony does it with all their movies from the get-go?
I know this is a bit off-topic, but I'd be thrilled if someone could explain to me why I'm wrong about these issues. It's been bugging me since about 1997.
Belloc
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.