RFC 2517 (rfc2517) - Page 1 of 7

Building Directories from DNS: Experiences from WWWSeeker

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Network Working Group                                       R. Moats
Request for Comments: 2517                                  R. Huber
Category: Informational                                         AT&T
                                                       February 1999


       Building Directories from DNS: Experiences from WWWSeeker

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
   memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   There has been much discussion and several documents written about
   the need for an Internet Directory.  Recently, this discussion has
   focused on ways to discover an organization's domain name without
   relying on use of DNS as a directory service.  This memo discusses
   lessons that were learned during InterNIC Directory and Database
   Services' development and operation of WWWSeeker, an application that
   finds a web site given information about the name and location of an
   organization.  The back end database that drives this application was
   built from information obtained from domain registries via WHOIS and
   other protocols.  We present this information to help future
   implementors avoid some of the blind alleys that we have already
   explored.  This work builds on the Netfind system that was created by
   Mike Schwartz and his team at the University of Colorado at Boulder
   [1].

1. Introduction

   Over time, there have been several RFCs [2, 3, 4] about approaches
   for providing Internet Directories.  Many of the earlier documents
   discussed white pages directories that supply mappings from a
   person's name to their telephone number, email address, etc.

   More recently, there has been discussion of directories that map from
   a company name to a domain name or web site.  Many people are using
   DNS as a directory today to find this type of information about a
   given company.  Typically when DNS is used, users guess the domain
   name of the company they are looking for and then prepend "www.".
   This makes it highly desirable for a company to have an easily



Moats & Huber                Informational
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