ICANN, IAB Ask VeriSign to Suspend SiteFinder

dmehus writes "ICANN issued an advisory late today concerning VeriSign's controversial SiteFinder service. The advisory requests that VeriSign voluntarily suspend SiteFinder until various independent and objective reviews, which are now underway, have been completed. Interested parties should see the advisory for more details." I think most people here can agree it was a bad idea, although it's not generating revenue for most of us either. ICANN isn't alone here either. Nuclear Elephant writes "The Internet Architecture Board issued this response to an ICANN inquiry about Verisign's SiteFinder service."

Comments

BIND and soundex

[Tirel]

instead of the verisign sitelooker page, I suggest that BIND (the software that runs 60% of the DNS) should be enhanced in several ways: The most important one, IMHO, is to compute a list of close matches and present these choices to the user. They may use the Soundex algorithm or some other tricks to see if characters are transposed, if one characters is wrong, if one is missing, etc. If well implemented, this would solve 60% of the problem. The remaining 40% is due to the fact that people sometimes doesn't actually mistype a known address... they type a dead wrong address, such as "amazonbookstore.com" instead of "amazon.com". In this case, BIND should split up the phrase into separate word (in this case "amazon book store" and redirect to a search engine with those words as parameters. The big question in this case is: which search engine? I think that one should be able to choose, in one way or another. If not, Google would be my choice ;-)