Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

The debate continues over how to solve the DNS mess. The mess exists because there are more people than there are names. So, who gets davidweinberger.com? (Hint: I didn't.) Not to mention who gets Disney.com, Schwarzenegger.com, and PamelaAnderson.com.

Dan Gillmor a few months ago said that Google had solved the problem, at least for now. If I want to find my pal Bob Smith, the Mulholland furrier, I google him with a query like "bob smith furrier mulholland." Very likely, Google will get it right.

So, why not build on this? Google could enable us to fill out a standard form with fields for name, email, web pages, parents, town, high school, college, jobs, employers, hobbies, publications, summer camps, etc. Then add a tab to Google.com called "People." Weight the form very heavily when searching for names, so that if you searched for "david weinberger herricks," the Google engine would notice that "herricks" is listed on my personal form as my high school, and thus would move my web pages (the ones I've listed on the form) way up the list. No one besides me would ever see my form itself.

Google has the heft to pull this off. If you know someone at Google, wanna pass this along? Alternatively, you might want to point out the gaping hole in my logic that makes this idea not just implausible but actually humiliating.