DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

In November of 2000 I created a list of the add-URL forms for what I considered to be the major, free, general-purpose search engines. I used those links frequently to submit websites for indexing.

I don’t do much website promotion any more, so I have not had any need to maintain my bookmarks. But today I revisited the list. I found that only three of the seven still offer free submissions. I was surprised — I know the web industry has been decimated, but it was still a shock to see it up close.

These still work: Alta-Vista, Northern Light, and Google.

Excite and Go now use Overture, aka GoTo.com, the “search engine” of paid placements. HotBot accepts no submissions. Lycos charges a fee. Inktomi charges a fee.

Missing in action: InfoSeek was part of Go.com, but Disney pulled the plug after Go.com lost $1 Billion (!).

Promising newcomers Teoma and WiseNut have succumbed to acquisition; AskJeeves purchased Teoma (which now charges a fee for sumbissions); LookSmart purchased WiseNut although WiseNut still offers free sumbissions. (I don’t expect that to last. LookSmart charges for directory submissions.)

I’m not simply lamenting the end of the free. Rather, I think it is hugely valuable and important to be able to search an archive of websites indexed by relevance, not by bid. It’s apparently possible for software (e.g. google’s PageRank) to intelligently find relevant content — and that’s what I want to see. I’d even pay for the privilege. Just don’t serve me advertising and call it “search results.”

Matt Haughey has written recently about domain hijackings. In subsequent reading I discovered an interesting resource — the DMOZ archive of domain-dispute news stories, sorted by domain. To be clear, not all disputed domains are the result of hijackings; these are generally separate issues.

See also the disputes listing of the World Intellectual Property Organization, whose apparent mission is putting cyber-squatters out of business. The section entitled “Evidence of Registration and Use in Bad Faith” in ICANN’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy delineates the conditions in which WIPO, as ICANN’s dispute-resolution division, determines whether a domain has been registered in bad faith.

Domain squatters are one of the lowest life forms that have achieved Internet access. I am happy to see a forum where they regularly lose claim to their assets.

Of course, the system is not perfect… sometimes there is no clear claim, as in the case of brown-shoes.com. In this dispute, the domain owner made a good case for the rights to the domain, a combination of generic words that forms a generic shoe-industry term, but which happens to be similar to a registered trademark (Brown Shoe Company Inc.). WIPO, perhaps too conditioned to side with large corporations (who most frequently are the folks who can afford to dispute domain ownership), forced transfer of the domain to Brown Shoe Company.

In a literal twist on meteorology, NASA now offers an asteroid-impact forecast.

The Chronicle offers some background info in NASA ‘asteroid-casting’ out of this world.

According to news.com:

The “We have the way out” campaign describes Unix as an expensive trap. One ad reads: “No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that’s more complex than ever.”

Microsoft and Unisys launched a website to promote this anti-Unix campaign. Problem was, the website was running on FreeBSD — one of the Unix OSes Microsoft would have you believe is too inflexible, too expensive, and too complex to use.

So on the 2nd of April, Unisys changed the site (http://www.wehavethewayout.com/) from Unix to Windows 2000, but couldn’t make it work!

You have to assume that any high-end webserver requires experts to keep it running. This is true whether the server runs a Microsoft OS or anything else. And you also have to assume that the one place you’re sure to find lots of experts on Microsoft’s OSes is Microsoft.

So, imagine the irony — not even Microsoft can keep this Windows 2000 machine running. Compound the irony: the site they can’t keep running is one that claims that Unix is too complex. I have to laugh.

As of this writing, http://www.wehavethewayout.com/ is still not working:

shell> lynx -mime_header http://www.wehavethewayout.com/ | head -3
HTTP/1.1 404 Object Not Found
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2002 14:52:36 GMT

1. Microsoft, Unisys announce anti-Unix website
2. Anti-Unix site revealed to rely on Unix
3. Anti-Unix site moved to Windows 2000, spews errors for 2 days

The campaign didn’t name the evil from which users should flee, but the graphic showed a floor almost entirely covered in mauve paint, mauve being the color of Sun Microsystems. So far, so good: but the alternative on offer was to jump through a window, which literate readers will know as defenestration, a popular way of inviting kings to commit suicide in 17th century Europe.

Jeff Zeldman takes on everybody’s least favorite domain registrar… check out the screenshot and then read the merciless (but oh-so-deserved) commentary.