Got that? You’re probably not alone if you think Web addresses are becoming unmanageable and ugly, bordering on unsuitable for public consumption. A three-year- old company called RealNames hopes to put a more presentable face on unsightly URLs. It has created nothing less than a parallel domain name system in which “real names” correspond to the holy tangle of http’s, dashes, underscores and random- seeming words that make up the average Web site address. Instead of going to Panasonic’s Web site, for example, and drilling down through multiple layers in order to find the one page about its new ShowStopper ReplayTV device, now you can simply type “Panasonic ShowStopper” into the address bar of your Internet Explorer browser (versions 3.0 and higher). It doesn’t work for everything yet. A company must purchase these keywords and actively link them to destinations within its Web site. But demand is clearly growing: the service, accessible at RealNames.com, already serves up 100 million queries a day.
