RFC 2517 (rfc2517) - Page 1 of 7
Building Directories from DNS: Experiences from WWWSeeker
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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