On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Scott Francis wrote:
On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 11:21:57PM -0800, Vadim Antonov had this to say: [snip]
Actually i do not propose any new layers. The "layer" in question exists already, in form of address books, hyperlinks and search engines.
one word - inaccuracy. Have you tried to do a search for any even moderately popular or public term lately?
Have you ever tried looking in the dictionary for the meaning of a word, and found multiple definitions? You are arguing against LANGUAGE, which is not strictly deterministic.
The last thing people want to do is have to sift through 50,000 or more results for the exact site they're looking for - this is _why_ we have domain names: so people can go exactly where they're trying to go.
What Vadim is trying to explain to you is that this does not scale(or at least not with the current system.) When I type in the world "apple" do I want information on the fruit, the computer company, or the record company(or something else that contains/is related to the string "apple"?) Add to this the complexity of multilingualism, where a string of characters can have a reasonably deterministic meaning or set of meanings in one language, and a completely different set of meanings in another.
Search engines are horribly inaccurate for trying to reach any single particular page, unless it's so bizarre that you only get a dozen search results. I would definitely not advocate search engines to replace the current DNS system, unless a whole new generation of search engines was created that could effectively deduce exactly where the user _really_ wanted to go, accurately, every time (which is what DNS currently does).
So tell me when I type in the word "apple" where exactly do I want to go?