Re: lynx-dev URL guessing for .CA domain suggestion

[Lloyd G. Rasmussen]

On Wed, 7 Oct 1998 20:23:29 -0700 (MST), 
Dave Eaton   <address@hidden> wrote:

>On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Leonid Pauzner wrote:
>
>> It would be really great to disable URL guessing for hosts ends
>> with "dot + two letters" since it most likely a country code
>> ...[clip]...
>> a typo in user-defined URL fall into the obviously stupid "URL guessing"
>> proccess like msk.ru.org/msk.ru.edu etc. - they definitely not exists.
>
>While there is no "msk.ru.org" or "msk.ru.edu", the domains you picked    
>do exist:
> 
> Rogers University (Tulsa, OK) = RU.EDU
> Renaissance Universal (Mainz, DE) = RU.ORG
>
>Personaly, I'm not a fan of domain guessing ... it masks all the other
>possibilities from the very user who doesn't know enough about the
>Internet to know to look elsewhere. The classic example is those who just
>enter "whitehouse" and get the X-rated site www.whitehouse.com, not the
>one at www.whitehouse.gov.
>
>If you are going to change the "guess" logic, please be careful not to
>make it miss even more possibilities.
>
>If you want to make it more exotic, I'd suggest to provide a config file
>entry so the user can define what to guess in what order.
>

There are entries in Lynx.cfg that are supposed to affect URL guessing 
priorities.  I haven't tried to work with them at all, but that's the 
first place to look.  

I noticed that URL guessing isn't working much on Wayne's Win/32 port 
from Pre 7 at www.fdisk.com/lynxport.html .  It could be because I 
reused my existing lynx.cfg instead of modifying the one which was 
supplied.  But I know there was also trouble with looking up hosts in 
this Win95 build, so something may be partially broken.  

In the DOS version, Pre 3 from Doug Coffman's site, you can type Lycos 
and go to www.lycos.com.  I understand why typing News will not go to 
www.news.com; that kind of URL isn't likely to work.  And the big-name 
browsers are starting to send people to a search engine when they type 
certain URLs into the Open box, so the days of URL completion's 
predictable behavior may be numbered anyway.  


-- Lloyd Rasmussen
Senior Staff Engineer, Engineering Section
National Library Service for the  Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress          202-707-0535
(work)       address@hidden    http://www.loc.gov/nls/
(home) address@hidden http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/lras/