Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 147 posts

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#81

Post by minor_nitwit »

Patrick_Devine wrote: post #44

The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea. Domain names are important because they provide a reasonable amount of trust. If I type http://apple.com , I'm 99.99999% certain that I've connected to Apple's website. This gets nasty with unicode, because a person can spam your email account and get you to click on a URL which looks very similar to something like apple…

I think the popularity of url shorteners shows that people are willing to click on links where they have no idea what is lurking behind an unintelligible string.

As for the apple site, there are other (better) systems in place for supplying identity information than just the url.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#83

Post by snowwrestler »

splatzone wrote: post #14
snowwrestler wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google search indexing might be one downside of this system, as Google tends to give a lot of weight to domains that match your search term. But in this case the actual domain is a "nonsense" hash. Perhaps the browser extension could be set so that whenever a search term is entered, it submits Google searches for both the raw text and its hash. If Google has indexed a domain that is a hash, and that exact hash is sub…

According to Moz it's hardly important at all: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

Exact match domain has the highest correlation of any on-page factor in that table--even higher than keywords in the title or H1.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#85

Post by snowwrestler »

Patrick_Devine wrote: post #44

The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea. Domain names are important because they provide a reasonable amount of trust. If I type http://apple.com , I'm 99.99999% certain that I've connected to Apple's website. This gets nasty with unicode, because a person can spam your email account and get you to click on a URL which looks very similar to something like apple…

Unicode domain names are no more dangerous than HTML emails, which can also be used to fool people into clicking links that look like one site but go to another.

Unicode or not, if you type in apple.com on your English keyboard, you will go to the website of Apple, Inc. (Unless your DNS cache has been poisoned.)

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#86

Post by zupa-hu »

penguincaravan wrote: post #40
TeMPOraL wrote: post #31

I might be missing something, but I completely don't get this idea, especially with the examples provided by the author. I have two major concerns: > Bind searches to domain names, eg "food in chicago" => f02970848a63988965aa40cd368ffcf9046209ca.com This IMO is bad, and goes in completely wrong direction. We've invented search engines to have such phrases not bound to a particular domain. Who would handle the "#://fo…

You're right, looks like someone already bought f02970848a63988965aa40cd368ffcf9046209ca.com

LoL xD

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#87

Post by akurtzhs »

byproxy wrote: post #23
arn wrote: post #5

Reminds me of "RealNames". Dot-com era company. $130 million in funding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames RealNames was a company founded in 1997 by Keith Teare. Its goal was to create a multilingual keyword-based naming system for the Internet that would translate keywords typed into the address bar of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser to Uniform Resource Identifiers, based on the existing Domain Name…

Also, AOL Keywords.

Google Plus has the same deal now. Search for +Pepsi on Google and it takes you to Pepsi's Google Plus page.

I'm certainly glad they stopped treating + as a search operator so we could get that feature in return.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#88

Post by joesb »

larrys wrote: post #53
TeMPOraL wrote: post #31

I might be missing something, but I completely don't get this idea, especially with the examples provided by the author. I have two major concerns: > Bind searches to domain names, eg "food in chicago" => f02970848a63988965aa40cd368ffcf9046209ca.com This IMO is bad, and goes in completely wrong direction. We've invented search engines to have such phrases not bound to a particular domain. Who would handle the "#://fo…

"and the primary source of frustration is that they are mostly taken by various squatters and other scums of the Internet" "Scums of the Internet"? Oh please. Where are you getting this all from exactly? You've just decided that since you weren't able to buy a domain [1] that you wanted at a price that you could afford to pay that all domains "are mostly taken by various squatters and other scum of the Internet". I m…

I don't know what "the right way" of "using" the domain name is. But I don't think sitting on the domain without actually using it is the right way.

Who is worthy of the domain? At least the one actually intend on using it is more worthy than the one intending to sit on it to ask for rip-off money.

Squatter are scums.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#89

Post by robbles »

pudquick wrote: post #39

I would be in favor of this idea if a little more thought was put into how the hashing function works. As it stands, someone typing in: food in Chicago will get a different URL than: food in Chicago And the same goes for: Chicago food, chicago food, food near Chicago, etc. Every one, with a single character difference (extra space, different word order, capitalization difference, regional spelling like theatre vs the…

You could add a normalizing step before hashing in the extension, similarly to what's usually done to email addresses typed in by users:

- Remove duplicate spaces and punctuation - lowercase entire query (just like DNS) - Detect and normalize homographs (is this a impossible problem, or are there solutions out there already?)

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#90

Post by chavesn »

My initial thought: This is terrible, because how would we ever know which sites we can trust? Something as tiny as an extra space would change the hash value.

But on second thought, the real problem is that we (the web technology community) have assumed domain names are even a remotely suitable proxy for trust. I don't think most common web users actually get this point. That's why phishing is so easy (except for the part about getting a phishing email past spam filters).

Do you think most people really know (or notice) the difference between webaccess.bankofamerica.com and webaccess.bankofamerica.x8.co? I doubt it.

So the real fix for this situation is creating a true trust system that most actual end users can understand and rely on.

Then, it seems only natural for something like this to be the future. UUIDs will act as the underlying addressing technology with "whatever you want" as your display name.

And as a bonus, it will really cut down on the cybersquatters' profitability.

Post reply on HN