Greeked domain names
According to Multilingual Search, quoting the Greek telecoms authority EETT, Greece is to introduce domain names expressed in the Greek alphabet in early July. The aim is apparently to boost Internet usage among Greeks who don’t always master the Latin alphabet. But it turns out to be only a half measure:
Unfortunately for the Greeks, as with other non-Latin alphabets, the step is something of a compromise as the Greek characters have to be slotted in between the protocol (http://www) and the country top level domain name (.gr).
Hard to confirm or find this news explicitly from the EETT site.
This idea has been around for ten years and is just as stupid as ever. It assumes that people mainly get to sites by typing in URLs, which is not true (they click on links). It insults human intelligence by assuming that people can’t type in some Latin characters. As you mention, it does not address the protocol and TLD parts of URLs. It gives rise to confusion and even security risks from the confusion of characters in different scripts.
The original people that came up with this idea thought they could make money by selling domain names in different scripts. They came up with some DNS server and browser hacks to make their scheme work, but it obviously never took off. RealNames was trying to accomplish the same thing, in a slightly more sane way, but they never solved the chicken-and-egg problem and crashed and burned. Now, however, we have a really good way to find exactly the site we want on the net, called a “search engine”. If I want to go to the Ford site, I just type in “Ford cars” to Google. Works perfectly, in Greek as well.
When Google analyzes the queries people throw at, they find lots of entire URLs. That’s because people type URLs directly into the Google search box--they don’t distinguish between it and the URL location box, and perhaps that’s as it should be. In fact, when confronted with a URL Google now just skips the search and jumps directly to the site. The Google search input box IS the new location bar, and already fully multilingualized.
Posted by torazaburo on 05/26 at 09:20 AM
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