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Re:Tech press misses Google/Amazon name grab by icebraining on Saturday June 16, 2012 @06:24AM (#4120309)
So after all these years we continue to support the middle-man idea (Google) instead of trying to figure out a way to move away from that.

If you want people to move away from middle-man, domains are certainly not the solutions, and the new TLDs will not change that for better nor for worse.

We had domains before Google. People switched because they suck as an human interface.

It's not OK for people to not know how to use the internet.

It's not only about that. I know perfectly well how it works, but I still use Google all the time for finding company websites, because it'd be incredibly stupid to spend 10m guessing the domain instead of making a 300ms request to a search engine.

Domains are great for decoupling URLs, configuration files, etc. from IP changes. They're certainly not a good mechanism for website discovery.

Re:Tech press misses Google/Amazon name grab by rudasn on Saturday June 16, 2012 @07:11AM (#4120366)
I'm not saying that domain names solve the problem of people typing "facebook" on google [1] or that typing "XYZ company" on google is a problem to be solved by XYZcompany.com. In other words, domains and search engines have distinct use cases and the problem is that people don't know how to use either.

[1] It is a problem because it allows people not to understand the basics of how the internet works. I don't expect people to understand protocols and stuff like that. People don't want to understand technology, they only want to benefit from it. I don't know 80% of the features my TV provides but I don't care - I can still watch TV. People feel the same about the Internet - they know they don't understand it but they don't care because they can still log in to facebook and watch videos on youtube. But using a middle man (call it Google, Yahoo, or even Facebook) to do these things undermines the nature of the internet as we know it and allowing this trend to continue will most likely lead to problems that we will have to resolve. (Not exactly similar, but when MS decided that browsers don't matter it was our job to tell people to stop using IE6 and switch to Firefox. I wouldn't want to be the guy that tells people don't use Google for this, use ____ instead).