Taking to Netscape Communications Corp yesterday about its new Smart Browsing technology in Communicator, and in particular the ability to type keywords, rather than URLs into the navigation bar and navigate around the internet to some extent, got us thinking that we had seen that somewhere before. Centraal Corp, based in Palo Alto has technology called the Real Name System (RNS), which for $40 a year enables companies to maintain a Real Name that maps onto their web sites, enabling users to type in a keyword and be taken directly to the web site. Keith Teare, the founder of Centraal said that although his company and Netscape have been in discussions for the past three months, the technology is Netscape’s own, but it stops short of mirroring the Centraal RNS technology, leaving a gap that his company still hopes to fill. He says there is a very good chance that Netscape will adopt the Centraal technology before the fall. The Netscape keyword technology works on three tiers based on three databases. The first database contains generic names that map to Netcenter channels. The second is based on the domain name system and tries to adapt the words typed to a domain name, but then only to the top level of a web site. The third sends the inquiry to a search engine, which is what Internet Explorer 4.x does when faced with keywords rather than URLs. Teare believes there is room for Centraal’s technology to be slotted in above the DNS database but below the top layer. He said Netscape is planning to see how its new technology is being used first, and anyhow, it will not be rolled out until towards the end of July. However he believes by around mid-August Netscape may be ready to make a decision. Teare said the business is self-supporting at the moment, getting between 200 and 500 registrations a day (at $40 a pop) and has around 5,000 registered already.
