Re: Statements against new.net?

[Patrick Greenwell <patrick () cybernothing org>]

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?