RealNames was a company founded in 1997 by

Keith Teare Keith Teare (born 27 August 1954, in Scarborough, North Riding of Yorkshire) is an English-American technology entrepreneur. Career Keith Teare has founded or co-founded several IT companies since the early 1980s. He is credited with being par ...

. Its goal was to create a multilingual keyword-based naming system for the Internet that would translate keywords typed into the

address bar In a web browser, the address bar (also location bar or URL bar) is the element that shows the current URL. The user can type a URL into it to navigate to a chosen website. In most modern browsers, non-URLs are automatically sent to a search eng ...

of Microsoft's

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

Uniform Resource Identifier A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), formerly Universal Resource Identifier, is a unique sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource, such as resources on a webpage, mail address, phone number, books, real-world obje ...

s, based on the existing

Domain Name System The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information ...

, that would access the

page Page most commonly refers to: * Page (paper), one side of a leaf of paper, as in a book Page, PAGE, pages, or paging may also refer to: Roles * Page (assistance occupation), a professional occupation * Page (servant), traditionally a young m ...

registered by the owner of the RealNames keyword. In effect, to users of Internet Explorer, RealNames became a

domain registry A domain name registry is a database of all Domain name, domain names and the associated registrant information in the top level domains of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet that enables third party entities to request administrative co ...

which was capable of registering names that worked without needing to belong to a

top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domain name, domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the DNS root zone, root zone of the nam ...

such as ".com" or ".net". RealNames and its backers expected this to be a lucrative source of income, and it raised more than $130 million of funding. RealNames depended on its partnership with Microsoft, which offered the RealNames service on Internet Explorer. RealNames shut down operations in 2002 following a decision by Microsoft to redirect the 1 billion page views per calendar quarter that RealNames was resolving from the browser address bar into the MSN search engine. In 2014,

Tucows Tucows Inc. is an American-Canadian publicly traded Internet services and telecommunications company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and incorporated in Pennsylvania, United States. The company is composed of three independent business ...

purchased RealNames.com. The domain now hosts a customized e-mail service, made possible by its acquisition of Mailbank and its long list of surname domain names.

References

Network addressing {{compu-stub

See also

References