It must have happened to all of you - you're trying to find something on the internet. You type the URL that you know it should be and find either:
• something that is connected with the word but is something other than what you were looking for.
• a single page ad offering to sell you the domain that should have contained the information that you were looking for.

So you try a search engine and have to narrow down the 15,000 sites that it found to get at the handful that address your needs.

The Name Squat Resolution Service would be a web site maintained by its users. It that would respond to www.<product-service-or-information>.com with a list of organisations that might have registered that domain had it not already been taken/squatted along with the URLs to find these organisations.

You click the one you want and proceed on your way with a smile upon your face. The whistling of a happy tune is purely optional at this point.
-- st3f, Feb 09 2002

Open Directory links for st3f http://www.welcomet...s.com/OpenDirectory
You might also want to try http://www/gdirectory.megaspider.com/info.usgo/kevfts [jurist, Feb 10 2002, last modified Oct 05 2004]

IETF 52 (Dec 2001), Monday morning http://www.ietf.org/ietf/01dec/irnss.txt
Internet Resource Name Search Service BOF (Birds of a Feather Session). Its "sublayer 2" is roughly what you describe. There are many ISP-specific commercial versions of this (e.g., "AOL Keywords"), but nothing generic, let alone computer-usable. However you word it, at some point "being the top answer for search term X" translates into $$$, so fairness and correctness of a generally available service are a difficult problem. [jutta, Feb 10 2002]

Aside from the 'This is the URL I'd have if someone hadn't gotten to it first' aspect, this idea sounds a lot like Open Directory.

The real problem with this idea [st3f] is what's to stop me from saying I should have gotten www.cocacola.com, www.nike.com, www.whitehouse.gov, www.google.com, etc? That is, where does it end?
-- phoenix, Feb 09 2002


I think you misunderstand me, phoenix. This would be an edited website with people sbmitting sites that had good references about, say coffee, under www.coffee.com on the site.

If I looked up www.nike.com on the site I would expect you to find links to sites about the goddess Nike. If you asked for a domain selling trainers to be posted on the site under nike, hoping to get some of nike's traffic, I would expect your request to be rejected.

Peter: You understand. You just don't like. That I can live with.

Can somone post a link for Open Directory?
-- st3f, Feb 09 2002


This is a subject I don't know "Squat" about, St3f, but you might check out the two links I provided which appeared on a generic MSN search for OpenDirectory. Sound like what you are looking for...Lots more where they came from!
-- jurist, Feb 10 2002


"The Name Squat Resolution Service would be a web site maintained by its users."
"This would be an edited website..."

Open Directory is an 'edited website', but it's not maintained by users. Anyone can submit a link, and the link is catagorized by an editor.

It sounds like the only thing different about your site is that you want to use URLs as catagories (which they wouldn't be, really). And you can bet Nike (shoes) would pitch a fit if they weren't listed as or under www.Nike.com.
-- phoenix, Feb 10 2002



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