
Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014) - lelf
https://newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websites-secret-meaning-urls
======
kev6168
Another reason I think is in China the search engines have been terrible since
the beginning. For example even if your search query is as specific as "ACME
inc. of AAA city in BBB province" , it would be your lucky day if the first
two result pages have that company's web site. What you get mostly are paid
ads and shitty seo stuff. It's been like this to this day.

So not being able to rely on search, people have to memorize companies' urls,
to type them into address bar and pass along to others the actual url string.
Internet companies are forced to display them predominantly in ads. So a
domain name that is cute/easy(often costing ridiculus amount) is all that more
important in China than elsewhere.

Google please come back, it will be a net gain for humanity.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> Google please come back, it will be a net gain for humanity.

I'd rather them wait until they are no longer required to censor their results
and track their users on behalf of the state security apparatus.

~~~
schuke
Most people would rather want this because you don’t have to bear the
consequences. To simulate the experience, I suggest you start using a censored
Bing exclusively while dialing down its search relevancy 30-40% for a start.
Make sure you also realize the political reality that your rulers would rather
go North Korea than giving up censorship.

------
twiss
> The phone companies China Telecom and China Unicom simply reappropriated
> their well-known customer service numbers as domain names, 10086.cn and
> 10010.cn, respectively.

[https://9292.nl](https://9292.nl) is an example of this outside China, taking
its name from 0900-9292 (a phone number you can call to get public transport
travel directions, now largely replaced by the website/app).

~~~
Cenk
Or [https://www.1177.se](https://www.1177.se) for Sweden, the health care
number/website. The NHS in the UK has [https://111.nhs.uk](https://111.nhs.uk)
as the URL for their new online emergency service.

~~~
stordoff
Nitpick: 111 is the urgent but non-emergency service. The first page asks you
to "Check it’s not an emergency" (signs of a heart attack/signs of a
stroke/severe difficulty breathing/heavy bleeding/severe injuries/seizure),
and to call 999 if it is.

------
mc32
>Chinese airline paid $280,000 for the phone number 88888888.

It certainly added wealth to the phone number holder/assigner.

~~~
blakesterz
I always wonder how much lawyers in the US pay for their phone numbers...
444-4444 or 888-8888 and so on. I would guess it's even more?

~~~
cpeterso
I see bus ads for an accident lawyer in California with the phone number (800)
800-0000. I wonder if that phone number is more valuable than 888-8888.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Probably pretty similar in California advertising to non-Chinese. To Chinese,
8 is a lucky number, so more 8s would be better.

------
wholien
I remember going to 4399 for games when I was an elementary student.

Part of the reason why numbers are so pervasive, in the 51job.com sense, is
that if you were to type out the pinyin for "i want a job" in Chinese... the
url would be insanely long and unwieldy. 51job.com is easy to type and
remember (also they have a billion ads everywhere). This means if you dont
have numbers, you will try to use the initials for all the pinyins in your
name. Jing Dong becomes jd.com

4008-517-517.com for McDonald's delivery is from their delivery phone number,
which they had years before the URL. You would hear 4008 517 517 with a jingle
on the radio all the time. The last time I heard it was probably 10 years ago
but funny how the tune of these oft-heard ad jingles never fully leave your
consciousness.

------
nerdbaggy
I wonder if this will ever evolve in emoji in URLs. I watched a short video
about a guy who is squatting on most of the emoji domains

~~~
mojo74
I now have the image of a man squatting over the pile of poo emoji. I accept I
will never grow up.

~~~
brndr
I guess this site is relevant here: [https://xn--ls8h.la/](https://xn--
ls8h.la/) (<pile of poop emoji>.la)

But apparently most TLDs don't support emoji URLs yet.

~~~
Technetium_Hat
the biggest barrier, in my opinion, is the ugly punycode links. most browsers
still do not render them properly, and if they did, it would have false
positives. (i.e. there is no way to tell if a string is intended to be
punycode or not)

~~~
0x0
It's not as much a matter of "still not rendering them properly", but more
that they are doing it on purpose to avoid homoglyph attacks. Earlier browsers
more OFTEN used to render them "properly", I believe.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Of course, this only helps against _foreign_ letters, you still have people
squatting or putting phishing on common typos of pure asci urls with basically
the same result.

Meanwhile, almost all of humanity still can't get decent urls in their native
language :(

~~~
bzbarsky
> Meanwhile, almost all of humanity still can't get decent urls in their
> native language :(

Why not?

For example, [http://xn--h1alffa9f.xn--p1ai/](http://россия.рф/) renders the
URL in Russian for me in the URL bar in all of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari
(though Chrome converts to punycode if I copy the URL from the URL bar,
unfortunately). [Edit: Also, it looks like HN's linkifier converts to
punycode; what I wrote there is "россия.рф" and that's what HN has stored if I
edit this comment.]

In more detail, for Firefox (where I can find this sort of thing quickly in
the code), there are the following things affecting the display:

1) The "network.IDN_show_punycode" preference. This defaults to false, so
punycode is not forced across the board.

2) There is a bunch of preferences for what toplevel domains are "safe" for
use with non-ASCII chars by default no matter what. That option currently
defaults to "false" as far as I can tell.

3) URLs the fit in the Highly Restrictive profile defined at
[https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/#Restriction_Level_Dete...](https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/#Restriction_Level_Detection)
are shown as non-punycode as far as I can tell.

4) There's some heuristic detection for URLs using multiple scripts at once
and blocking that.

There are also preferences to force-allow or force-deny use of IDN with
certain characters; those sets are empty by default.

In any case, the default behavior looks to me like a single-script URL in any
language would be shown in IDN. Do you have a counter-example?

[https://searchfox.org/mozilla-
central/rev/75294521381b331f82...](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-
central/rev/75294521381b331f821aad3d6b60636844080ee2/modules/libpref/init/all.js#2043-2189)
has the relevant preferences with their default values as of today.

Disclaimer: I work on Firefox, and have been involved peripherally in some of
the IDN work.

------
leroman
This is also an interesting way to go about dealing with the scarcity of
domain names

------
irrational
>though the U.S. recently agreed to hand it over to a “global multi-
stakeholder community” in 2015

Hmm, it seems like the title should have a year after it.

------
RandomBacon
The last sentence is odd:

> You can’t blame other countries for wanting to tell the American 250s to
> 0748.

250 = idiot

0748 = go die

Which translates:

> You can’t blame other countries for wanting to tell the American idiots to
> go die.

I'm not sure why the author felt the need to include that.

(Edit: Am I wrong for questioning the article?)

~~~
coderholic
It doesn't seem odd given the context of the full paragraph, which starts:

> Still, the numbers/letters divide is emblematic of the Internet’s built-in
> bias: Even more than two decades after its birth, it’s still a fundamentally
> American system.

It describes how URLs are frustrating and difficult to use for non-English
speakers. Given that, it makes a joke about that frustration using the URL-
hacks that are often used in China, which is what the whole prior article
covers.

~~~
tlrobinson
I get that the author wanted to express frustration and be clever, and he had
limited examples of “number-based slang” to do so with, but I agree with the
parent comment that calling Americans “idiots” and telling them to “go die”
seems excessively hostile.

Though I also can’t imagine “go die” has the same force in Chinese that it
would have in English if it’s a common slang.

~~~
RandomBacon
That's my thought too. Apparently HN does not agree which I think is sad. It's
interesting information in the article, but being hostile just because the
Internet was pioneered in the U.S. and thus a lot of U.S. customs are baked in
seems excesive. I like anime, but I'm not hostile to the Japanese because the
shows I like are spoken in Japanese with only English subtitles.

~~~
mikeash
Anime isn’t deeply embedded in society the way the internet is now. Imagine if
you had to learn some Japanese just to access your bank account or buy plane
tickets.

~~~
RandomBacon
I have (Japanese, Spanish, and Korean). I didn't hate the host cultures
because of it.

~~~
mikeash
I don’t mean imagine if you had to do that in order to live in those
countries. I mean, imagine if you had to do that in the US, to access your
American bank down the street.

------
ww520
420.com certainly works!

------
blakesterz
Mods, this is from 2014, maybe add that to the title?

------
fajr_rd
This article has been discussed 5 years ago (at its release).
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076)

------
ChrisArchitect
please put the year [2014] after this title. Ancient as the Chinese culture
it's about heh

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076)

