RE: Announcement: new whois server in production+new features
Hi David, congratulations, nice new features !!! However, I guess this is rather a bug, isn't it ;-) Querying for "christian unknown" seems to bring a list of all Christians instead of "No entries found", or how should I formulate an explicit "givenname surname" query ? Regards, Christian
Hi Christian,
Christian Panigl, ACOnet/UniVie +43 1 4065822-383 writes :
congratulations, nice new features !!!
Thanks.
However, I guess this is rather a bug, isn't it ;-)
Querying for "christian unknown" seems to bring a list of all Christians instead of "No entries found", or how should I formulate an explicit "givenname surname" query ?
This is more a side effect of the new 'unlimited number of matches' feature. The algoritm works as follows: - Try to find an exact matching name - If nothing found try to find an object that references all individual keys, but skip keys that don't match any objects. (It tries to do a kind of best guess) The firstname usually had too many matches and thus you would get: 'Christian' -> too many matches 'unknown' -> no matches and the database would give you 'no matches' (may be this was a bug ;-)) My personal opinion is that such a 'best guess' method is just fine: - people with not so common first/last names will only find a few objects that probably contains the object they were searching for, and thus you don't need to do extra queries with firstname/lastname only. - you easily discontinue the query if you got too many objects back. - you can use grep if you know part of the last name, or other tricks to find the object you were looking for (hopefully too difficult for the marketing people that would like to use our data ;-)). However, I can easily change this behavior if the database working group wants this. Kind regards, David K.
David.Kessens@ripe.net writes: My personal opinion is that such a 'best guess' method is just fine:
I do not agree on this one. If more than one key value is given only objects matching all keys should be returned. That is the behaviour I would expect. If the user wants to loosen up the query, they can consciously do that. Since whois responses are fast, there is no point in second guessing the user's intentions to save time. Daniel
Hello *,
David.Kessens@ripe.net writes: My personal opinion is that such a 'best guess' method is just fine:
I do not agree on this one. If more than one key value is given only objects matching all keys should be returned. That is the behaviour I would expect. If the user wants to loosen up the query, they can consciously do that. Since whois responses are fast, there is no point in second guessing the user's intentions to save time.
Daniel
I agreee with Daniel's opinion. We are using some scripts to check out whether a person is in the database or not. A "not found" message is the response I (and my scripts ;-) would expect 'cause the script can not decide if a "best guessed"-object is really the person in question. Perhaps, the best guess feature should be switched on only if desired !? Comments? rgds, Dirk Pantring (DE-NIC Hostmaster) -- _0_ Dirk Pantring eMail: pantring@nic.de / \ RZ<-- Rechenzentrum/DE-NIC \_______/ Universitaet Karlsruhe Tel: +49 721 373723 / / | \ \ Postfach 6980 Fax: +49 721 373741 _/_/__|__\_\_ D-76128 Karlsruhe Fax: +49 721 32550
participants (4)
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Christian Panigl, ACOnet/UniVie +43 1 4065822-383
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Daniel Karrenberg
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David.Kessens@ripe.net
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Dirk.Pantring@nic.de