Today I salute you, Mr. Cybersquatter. When nobody thought of buying staythin.com or wikiredia.com, you saw a business opportunity. I salute you for stifling my productivity and the progress of humankind by owning every name that could be interesting on the Web. For making me waste my time and money when I don't want to settle for a .biz domain. For crawling the Web to find strings that are mentioned often and buying the associated domain names. Thank you.
[Editor's Note: After spending hours yelling at his computer, Professor von Ahn would like to finally strike back against squatters by somehow making them think uninteresting strings are actually valuable names so that they buy them and lose money.]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
luis von ahn is a rankmaniac
ReplyDeleteLuis I am going to get luisvonahn.blogspot.com....
ReplyDeleteMay be someday you will pay me to get that back...
And the best of all these are free and I dont need money to buy them. Hahahaha
Luis, just found out from Panos Ipeirotis that you are blogging. Isn't this basically a scalping problem? Only that the domain name registrars aren't allowed to use an auction market, so all of the action is in scattered secondary markets? That said, I suspect domain names are a lot more fungible than they used to be.
ReplyDeleteI think an argument can be made that "scalping" domain names stops innovation and that therefore registering a domain name should have similar requirements to registering a trademark (for which you must prove that you intend to use it).
ReplyDeleteI wasted weeks to find a domain name (yeah, I know... it sucks). My godfather is a Markov model (I assume): http://www.makewords.com/ I'm pretty sure that I provided several hints to squatters by clicking on the less crappy suggestions -- another application of "human computing"? :-)
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking about this off and on since you brought it up a while ago. So if part of how they make money is by claiming the domain name gets a certain level of traffic just because of the name, you have to hit them where it hurts right?
ReplyDeleteI'm still stuck on how to do this effectively. A crowdsourcing solution might be to get people to report these "honest businessmen" as malware sites. Of course, that's fibbing a bit, but if enough people lie, then who knows what's true. :P
Another way is to make your own version of OpenDNS (or just convince OpenDNS to do it) where you treat those sites as non-existent (and thereby improving the user experience).
Yet another option is a firefox plugin that blocks those sites (and lets people report them easily). Again, we could just use an existing popular ad-blocking plugin if we can convince the devs to join our side.
Btw you might want to hurry. Luisvonblog.com is still available. Unless some unused domain name harvester finds this mention of it and gets to it first.
These are all good ideas.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the right answer is to simply stop using domain names that have any mnemonic value. Consider my domain name, http://thenoisychannel.com. It's the top hit on Google for noisy channel, tunkelang blog, and just about any other query that should find it. If you are a regular, you can bookmark it or add it to your RSS feeder, in which case you see it by its title or your own name for it. Isn't that a better model than relying on domain names?
ReplyDeleteThere is already a project for this: http://www.ivegotafang.com/
ReplyDeleteI have read the article after that i had known that the details related to them.I have found the Registered my Domain name in the site Registration.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'll register the web address luis-von-ahn.xxx someday.
ReplyDelete