You are what you search on the Web

Currently, sitting on top of the most expensive domain name pile is insure.com, which was bought for US$1.6 million in 2001 and fetched 10 times that figure last year when an insurance company bought it.

The clairvoyant owner of a dating website first registered the name sex.com in 1996 and it fetched US$14 million in 2006. The smart money is on it once more becoming the most expensive domain name in the world. Bidding starts at US$1 million.

Do the math and domain names look like blue-chip investments, recession proof and a guaranteed earner without having to do any work, beyond sending an e-mail and credit card number to the registrar.

As for the world's other most costly domain names, Friedrich Nietzsche was most insightful: “When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you”. He obviously wasn't thinking of the Web, but he might as well have been. As soon as we start searching for what interests us, it shows us who we are.

Therefore, we shouldn't be too surprised to find that domain names relating to sex and money top the charts, while beer, diamonds, gambling, toys and, oddly perhaps, Israel, are the other candidates for what fetches top dollar in terms of Internet searches.

There will be a revolution in the world of domain names, however, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) introduces addresses with non-Latin characters, sometime later this year.

For the first time, Web addresses written in Chinese, Arabic and other languages will be allowed.

It will be the biggest transformation in ICANN's existence because, of the approximately 1.6 billion Internet users, more than half use languages that are not Latin-based.

According to Internetworldstats.com the number of English users is 27.6 percent, while Chinese-language users are 22.1 percent.

While those who do not write in English were previously sidelined by having to use the language or Latin-based characters, a new universe will open up to these people. Instead of being predominantly English or ABC-centric, the World Wide Web will become what it says it is.

It will be like the Tower of Babel all over again.

China is ahead of the curve on this one. It has been testing systems that allow users to enter Web addresses in Chinese characters for some time, and you can bet there are a million and one people out there shaping up to register the most popular character domains.

For sure, they will be the Chinese-language equivalents of sex, money and the rest. Some things never change.

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