I had the same thought when I was thinking of how, say, my mom would search for websites.
For instance, she loves BBC America News Network. Now, say on maidsafe if she attempted to navigate to a site called: BBC (Think xtube or similar)
She knows what she meant, but the search engine had a hard time discerning what she meant and may return various (what she would percieve to be) inappropriate suggestions, but would be perfectly viable suggestions, because the search engine wasn’t given enough input.
So might one way to mitigate this be designing a search that takes a minimum amount of input? Say, X number of words; Or two fields (name / datatype); Or several descriptors (news site, british origin)?
I guess what I’m saying is that to build a feasible model, searching by one keyword is useless. Giving quality information along with a frame of reference is necessary for a search tool that would index (eventually) the entire web. Take the “advanced search”, and make it default.
EDIT: Or have several different site search engines:
waaaaaaaaaaaaah xD serously … who hasn’t had these search results which made you think “WHAAAT?!” thanks for this laugh … i even had one of these moments when i was in a public library searching for some differential equation stuff … very strange situation xD
but more data doesn’t necessarily change the outcome of your thought … “bbc video british origin” because there was an interesting report on bbc this morning that you missed …
This research on NameCoin mentioned in the article posted by @smacz confirms that squatting is a major problem in a fixed price first-come, first-served system:
our methodology for detecting “squatted” and otherwise inactive domains reveals that among Namecoin’s roughly 120,000 registered domain names, a mere 28 are not squatted and have nontrivial content.
Something I hadn’t though of myself is that it apparently also leads to market failure:
The speculator may have zero utility for a name and makes no use of the name himself; he hopes that demand for a name will rise in the future, and may therefore not sell to a buyer who has a positive utility today. This could lead to a market failure in a few ways. The uncertainty around future demand means that some names may be squatted indefinitely, while legitimate users may end up with sub-optimal names. If most valuable names are locked up by squatters, it may prevent the growth of the system, in turn preventing the growth in market price for names that speculators are hoping for.
It would be kinda independent of it, because the petname internally references the unique key-based name.
I really like the petname system, and I think we should try to integrate strong support for sharing petnames, regardless of what kind of absolute DNS we are going to use. The GNUNet delegated naming system introduced to us by @catbert is essentially a public petname sharing scheme.
My only concern with @Seneca proposal is that wealthy competitors could hurt legitimate sites.
Example: some college kid creates a site called Facebook and the leading competitor at the time MySpace notices that Facebook is gaining traction. So, MySpace pays enough Safecoin to beat Facebook’s rating and builds a spoof Facebook site with the same domain name to mess with Facebook’s popularity.
Edit: I know there has to be a simple SAFE solution.
Both sites show up when searching for a site named “facebook”. The search engine provides a discernible differentiation of the two. Perhaps based on which acquaintences of the user are using which site in addition to site ranking? (Proposition for search engine functionality forthcoming) This is the moving bus/paper napkin problem.
Sharing between friends on-the-grid:
Friend1 shares his link (private unique key + suggested petname) with friend2. Friend2 recieves private key and can call the site whatever he wants to in his petname (either what his friend suggested or something else). His personal profile will then reference that particular site whenever the petname is used. Not the globally ambiguous name of the site, the globally unique key of the site.
It’s a legitimate concern, one that I share. I don’t see the perfect solution right now, but the goal should be to minimize the impact of such hostility, which would in turn reduce the odds of it happening in the first place.
What @smacz just proposed would reduce the impact greatly I think. Sharing links digitally should use the petname system by default, not the absolute DNS-like link.
This has the same problem as counting “views”. The reason why Reward the Creator doesn’t suffer from this problem is because the cost faking the popularity (bandwidth and such) would be higher than the additional rewards earned. Many DNS names have great value though, so it becomes viable to create or sell fake usage.
okay - then facebook (because of having already maaaany visitors inside the safe network) just creates also a MySpace website and will have a higher rank there too
or a huge electric-motors-company just creates a website for every small company in the same business … it would even be easier to highjack a website when being huge than with views …
I’m not 100% sure about that … you can login with any account you wish … only if you want to store something in your account you do have to pay something … so an account coming into existance doesn’t necessarily cost anything … creating a persistant account costs something …
anyway … the question about the view count is a good one i think and again is one point contra views
To prevent account creation attack, we need to pay it withing a certain time. Dirvine is currently thinking about the best time. Example is we can create an account but we have to pay it withing 30 min or the account is deleted. It’s from Dirvine itself but don’t remember where he say that.
… i even had one of these moments when i was in a public library searching for some differential equation stuff … very strange situation xD
and again is one point contra views 