have recently reaquired the RealNames domain name – realnames.com. This is some 30 moths after we were forced to close the company.
It feels good to have 100% ownership back of a thing I spent 5 years creating. To be honest I’m not yet sure what I will do with it.
Anyway, I have all of the old data and have created – over a weekend – a new search engine based on the RealNames data. Yes I coded it myself – and it shows….
….For what it’s worth I believe there are enormous opportunities to innovate in search today. The crawl and index technology that has done such a good job in dealing with the staic web is very poor at daling with today’s web. New challenges mean lots of potential to innovate.
Additionally the problem addressed by RealNames – that is the poverty of the DNS as a naming and navigation system for the world’s internet users – remains unresolved.
Google’s direct navigation via Keyword feature [ in the Google toolbar], and Microsoft’s version of the same thing (try typing a natural language Keyword in the IE browser that does not have the Google toolbar installed] are both falling far short of what is needed – a standard, natural language, naming system, available through all browsers, and embedded as a sub-index in all search engines, with the ability to have names registered in all human readable scripts.