Re: Announcement: new whois server in production+new features

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.