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Comment by elliottinvent | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for taking a look. In my opinion, the methods of adoption of the semantic web (html tags) weren’t that complicated. The different variations and possibilities of how even basic data could be described is what made it complicated for those storing data and developers building apps on top of it.

With NUM, we’re not asking people to store this data in DNS because it’s simpler (although it does separate it out from your website which has benefits in my opinion), the point of storing it in DNS is that we can pre-populate it at scale and offer basic tools to manage this data safely in DNS.

Your project sounds cool. Is it searchable through a centralised database or some other way? Google have done the centralised model and that’s what we’re trying to offer an alternative to.

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It’s agent based - while currently we store the results of a search query (to present them to you), with our tool an agent will go and browse the web for you, looking up what you want.

The project is focused on repetitive tasks on the internet. It’s not intended to replace one off searches but rather to build datasets/tables/graphs on your query.

One off search: best pizza in Berlin

Our usecase: show me the best rated salami pizzas sorted by price in Berlin

Whereas you’d visit each website with a one off search and go through their menu (and TripAdvisor ratings) we’d serve you a table/graph/written summary…

Where does it get a list of domains to crawl that match a given query?

I was totally aware that you’ll be asking this question and it was intentionally not said, sorry :)

EDIT:

it’s due to the workings of the agent that we do not need to index the internet to use it

Ok, good luck! Hope to hear about it on here some day.

Thanks! You may signup on [1] but you’ll need to wait still to use it.

On NUM: I like the idea of building open graphs, but to move the needle it gotta be easier for business owners to provide that information. Lots of orgs use let’s encrypt some of them update their dns records every 90 days with a dns challenge. If there was to be some way to use a process like this (with a companion tool) to get business info into NUM records it would help adoption. I find the idea of calling a domain, sending money to a domain compelling I have to say.

[1] https://get-sentinel.io

Thanks for the feedback.

It works for 90% of UK businesses already, because we’ve pre-populated the DNS with their phone numbers, addresses, social media.

So they don’t need to adopt it, for it to work. They can if they want to override the pre-populated data but they can also do that with our simple tools.

See https://companydirectory.uk for an example app powered by NUM.

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