A New Way to Find ‘www.whatever.com’
Every day, people are bombarded with numbers they need to know. Phones. Faxes. Pagers.
And with the emergence of the Internet age, so too comes a slew of memory-stretching acronyms, from e-mail names to Web addresses. Who can remember it all?
For the record:
12:00 a.m. Aug. 27, 1997 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday August 27, 1997 Orange County Edition Business Part D Page 7 Financial Desk 2 inches; 48 words Type of Material: Correction
Internet addresses--In a story Monday about a new way to search the World Wide Web, the definition of domain name system, or DNS, was incorrect. DNS refers to the international system of Internet domain servers that convert Web page addresses--like www.latimes.com--into the unique numerical address that identifies a particular computer.
A Lake Forest start-up wants to cut through the jumble and make the process easier: Let businesses use their phone numbers as their Internet addresses.
“We realized that remembering ‘www.whatever.com’ is just as difficult as remembering a sequence of numbers,” said David T. Bagley, founder of the Internet Phone Number Co. “So why not have a tool that lets everything else fall under a single, simple phone number?”
The Internet is a collection of computer networks worldwide, and each network consists of individual machines. Each computer in the network has a unique numerical address known as a domain name server, or DNS.
The DNS helps computers locate each other. So when a person tries to get to the search engine Yahoo!, for instance, he types in “https://www.yahoo.com” and hits return. When that happens, his computer searches the world for a machine with Yahoo!’s DNS number, which is 204.71.177.33.
“DNS provides a highly flexible paradigm for the technology world, but its marketing perspective is horrible,” Bagley said. “I’ve seen people with business cards that list five numbers and two Web addresses. It’s ridiculous information overload.”
Bagley’s Internet Phone Number has developed a tool for the PC that works with Netscape’s World Wide Web browser. Once the free software is installed, a person can use the program to browse the Web by punching in a company’s phone number.
“We’re an additional control panel for Netscape, so you can use our plug-in to search by phone number. Or you can use Netscape’s original system,” Bagley said. “A business can use both systems, neither or either.”
But the catch is that it only works on sites that have registered their telephone numbers with Internet Phone Number.
Users can order a free diskette of the search tool from the Lake Forest company’s Web site, at https://www.ipndialer.com.
P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com
