It is hierarchical and to a large extent centralised. You will be the master of *.foo.com, but you have to buy foo.com off the .com registrar.

These top level domain registrars, if not owned by national governments, are at least strongly influenced and increasingly regulated by them.

This of course makes these registrars a tempting target for oppressive governments like China, UK and the USA, and for insane laws like SOPA and the Digital Economy Act which seek to control information, and shut down sites which say things the government doesn’t like.

Replacing this system with a less centralised model is therefore a high priority for anyone wanting to ensure the protection of the free internet.

Turning text into numbers isn’t the real problem

It may not be an entirely new observation here; the problem of turning a bit of text into a set of numbers is, from a user’s perspective, not what they’re after. They want to view facebook, or a photo album on flickr.

So finding relevant information is what we’re really trying to solve, and the entire DNS system is really just a factor of search not being good enough when the system was designed.

Consider…

• Virtually all modern browsers have auto complete search as you type query bars.
• Browsers like Chrome only have a search bar
• My mum types domain names, or partial domain names, or something like the domain name (depending on recollection) into Google

For most cases, using the web has become synonymous with search.

Baked in search

So, what if search was baked in? Could this be done, and what would the web look like if it was?

What you’re really asking when you visit Facebook, or Amazon or any other site is “find me this thing called xxxx on the web”.

Similarly when a browser tries to load an image, what it’s really saying is “load me this resource called yyyy which is hosted on web server xxxx on the web”, which is really a specialisation of the previous query.

You’d need to have searches done in some sort of peer to peer way, and distributed using an open protocol, since you’d not want to have to search the entire web every time you looked for something. Neither would you want to maintain a local copy of the Entire World.

It’d probably eat a lot of bandwidth, and until computers and networks get fast enough, you’d probably still have to rely on having large search entities (google etc) do most of the donkey work, so this may not be something we can really do right now.

But consider, most of us now have computers in our pockets with more processing power than existed on the entire planet a few decades ago; at the beginning of the last century the speed of a communication network was limited by how fast a manual operator could open and close a circuit relay.

What will future networks (and personally I don’t think we’re that far off) be capable of? Discuss.

I have noticed that before they come to me, quite a few of my clients have used other consultants – many of whom, it would seem, are not quite as careful as I am.

Thing is, I talked to a number of my friends in the same line of work and they have all said that they have had similar experiences.

One commonality between all these cases is that the previous contractor was found either through a job site or through an agent. On paper the contractor looked rather good, but when it came to the actual work their skills (and in rare cases their personality) was found to be somewhat lacking.

With many people focussed on just ‘getting the gig’, in both these cases there seems to be no real incentive to put across wholly accurate information.

Clients too often ‘big up’ the project in order to make it more attractive, often promising options in lieu of immediate payment. All too often enthusiasm for the idea trumps reality.

To my mind, the problem that people are trying to solve here is almost exactly the same as the one you’re trying to solve when dating… basically that both parties have a set of requirements and are looking for mutual compatibility, but there is a strong incentive to exaggerate.

This got me thinking.. could it be possible to use the dating paradigm to improve success?

Perhaps the algorithmic approach employed by OKCupid could be adapted to this domain?

OKCupid is interesting because it asks seemingly unrelated questions which betray some aspect of the user’s personality. It is hard to game the result as results are averaged over a very large dataset, and a user is encouraged to add to this set all the time by means of making it feel like a game (and as Ben pointed out in his blog, this can be used to provide an incentive for much).

That said however, most of my clients have been found by word of mouth or from meeting face to face at events. So, like dating, I suspect that while the internet is a handy tool the real results are going to occur in the real world through social interaction.

So go to the next tuttle!

Image “Endless love” by Ali Nishan