On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 09:06:15PM +1100, Saliya Wimalaratne wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, Nick Andrew wrote:
> > I randomly guess at names. And I know how the DNS works, so it's a safe
> > bet that a lot of people who don't know how the DNS works also do it.
> 
> At first, I thought this was a troll :)

I only troll when there's some humour in the topic.

> *Most* internet users use a search engine to find what they are looking
> for.

Me too, but when I'm looking for a particular _company_ (e.g. today's
one was J.R.Turk, the electrical trade suppliers) I will usually avoid
the search engines and try likely domain names. It's obvious if I
got the right company or not.

I won't be typing "electrical" into the URL field, if that's the sort
of activity you're referring to.

> (i.e. that gives them the results that are most useful to them for a given
> query),

Sometimes, search engines are more trouble than they're worth. To me,
it's like the difference between the online White and Yellow pages:

White pages will tell me all names of companies which start with "Turk".

Yellow pages will tell me all electricians, including some in other
states (which I asked to not be included, but the search engine did
anyway, perhaps because those companies had paid for extra hits), and
the one I need may be far down the list.

> > If my guess is wrong I get somebody unexpected (or no such domain). No
> > problem, I just guess again. It takes a few seconds of my time.
> 
> I expect that your time is worthless to you, from the above.

Leave the insults out of it, thanks. If I choose to gamble a few seconds
of time on a likely domain name, that says nothing about how valuable
or otherwise my time is.

> > > That's akin to randomly stabbing
> > > in the last 4 digits of a phone number, secure in the knowledge that your
> > > Aunty Beryl lives in town 'foo' and you know the first four digits that
> > > belong to 'foo'.
> > 
> > Randomly dialling a telephone number costs $$ if somebody answers, and
> > then the dialler has to deal with the person who answers, if only
> > briefly. Websites don't get annoyed if you go away suddenly and it
> > doesn't cost $$ per GET request. So the analogy is really not valid.
> 
> Of course it does (cost per wasted request). In terms of time lost,
> bandwidth used, whatever. The analogy *isn't perfect*, granted, but not
> for the reasons that you quote :)

I guess the onus is on me to provide a better analogy then.

Perhaps a better analogy is, looking up all the ACME listings in the
White Pages and dialling them in sequence and asking them "Are you
the ACME Corp which made my widget type B?"

Nick.