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Sun Microsystems' advertising claims to have put the @ in dotcom. The Oxford English Dictionary has added "dot-com" to its lexicon. It is no surprise then that there is a Dotcom Directory [http://www. dotcomdirectory.com or http://www. dotcom.com]. It is loosely based on the Network Solutions [http: /www. networksolutions.com] database of registered domain names covering the dot-com, dot-org, and dot-net generic top-level domain (gTLD) categories. Recently, the Dotcom Directory was folded into the dotcom. com Web site with its articles and statistics on the Internet.
Research for this article began some 4 months ago. One of the greatest obstacles to completing the writing task was continuing changes at the site. At one point, mid-week in November between 1:30 PM PST and 3 PM, two new buttons appeared on the search dialog box. Neither of the buttons at that time connected with any data. These links went live sometime during the December holidays. Some are quite current, e.g., today's stock closing price. Skepticism over which "today" was today was relieved after checking another site and finding closing price and volume numbers that matched.
So how did this portal come into being? And what can it do for the professional searcher?
Background - Network Solutions
Network Solutions was founded in 1979 and a few years later purchased by Science Applications Inc. (SAI). An early contract with the National Science Foundation [http://www.nsf gov] made it a registrar for the .com, .net, .org, and .edu namespace. As the U.S. government divested itself from the underwriting of much of the infrastructure of the Internet in the late 1990s, Network Solutions became the sole register of the. com, . net, and. org domain names. Network Solutions maintained the stability of the registration process while the privatization of other aspects of the Internet infrastructure was worked out. The most notable of these efforts was the creation of the Internet Committee on Assigning Names and Numbers (ICANN) [http:/ /www.icann.org]. In June 2000, Verisign acquired Network Solutions.
The need for a database of registered domain names was quickly recognized shortly after the codification of network protocols. The earliest effort, RFC 742 Name/Finger, December 30, 1977, described a protocol which would "return a friendly, human-oriented status report on either the system at the moment or a...