Web spiders such as AltaVista are indiscriminate as to what pages they crawl and what words they index. Thus, a search for "Saturn" in AltaVista yields 600640 hits, including any personal page offering to sell a used Sega Saturn as well as any amateur astronomer’s photograph of the planet.

Centraal’s subscribers prepare their submissions describing their site in XML (Extensible Markup Language) and store this "metadata" on their own servers. They then submit their entries via the Web, paying a $40 per year fee for each "real name" registered. The XML-tagged metadata is replicated in Centraal’s database and indexed for user queries.

Subscribers – those who register names in the Real Name System -- are told that names that generate a high level of user interest will be subject to higher fees, which will be negotiated with the subscriber in advance. Thus a Saturn automobile dealership would presumably more than $40 per year to be listed, but far less than General Motors might pay for their home page for the product itself.

Keith W Teare, founder, president, CEO & director conceived of the Real Name System in 1996. Previously, Teare co-founded Easynet, an ISP in the United Kingdom. Centraal co-founder Jean Marie Hullot developed the Interface Builder applications development tool for the Next computer. Members of Centraal’s technical team include others who worked on Next’s software tools.

AltaVista and other search engine companies have over the last year pursued a strategy of enhancing their search services in order to make them more useful – and better able to compete with Yahoo. All of the major spiders now offer some sort of browsing view by subject or channel. AltaVista and others have formed alliances with Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble to offer books related to a user’s search. And last December AltaVista announced a free multi-language online translation service.

Bob Hult, a DEC Vice President and General Manager of the AltaVista Search service said in a statement "We are always looking for new ways to build our Internet capabilities to reach a broader audience and to provide AltaVista users with an enhanced search experience. Centraal is unique in its approach of matching an advertisers' product or brand to a user's search result.''

It is not immediately clear how the Real Name System might be integrated into AltaVista. One could imagine a sort of segmented hit list, with registered Real Names appearing before the full-text hit list. Or the model may be more like the Amazon tie-in, in which case the user would follow a hyperlink to see the Real Names.

DEC’s press release announcing the Centraal alliance claims this is the "first" spider deal with Centraal, opening the door for speculation that the deal is not exclusive, in which case other spider companies may follow suit.

Although there is currently a great deal of discussion of XML, Centraal is one of the first businesses to deploy a highly-visible application based on this emerging technology. Centraal is filling a gap left by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and the W3 Consortium, which have discussed standards for a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for years without delivering a working standard. URIs were supposed to allow a user to enter "Moby Dick" instead of the URL of a particular online copy of Moby Dick. Since the Real Name System is a for-fee service intended to let companies leverage brand identities, it does not completely fill the vision for URIs. It will be interesting to see if the standards bodies will finally be motivated to offer an open XML-based metadata registry, perhaps integrated with the Domain Name System (DNS).