I conducted a little poll on X to find out what people do when they discover that someone important has a .eth name.
You've just discovered that a very high profile person has a .eth in their X profile! Where do you go to search more about their ENS name?
— Seán Murray | sean3.eth (@financeguy74) August 15, 2023
A little more than half rush over to etherscan, presumably to view that user’s transaction history. The ENS Domain App was the next most selected first destination, followed by Google or Bing. Somewhere in between #2 and #3 would’ve been ENS Vision, judging by the replies to the poll.
I was most curious to see how many people selected Google or Bing since I’ve got a working theory about .eth names as webpages. Search engine results appear to be a completely ignored area of value within the ENS community for some reason.
On the eth.loan forum, meanwhile, there’s been an active discussion among acquaintances about how to turn names into actual digital real estate on search.
Here is one example of how 3531.eth comes up in Google, for example, in positions 2, 3, and 4:
The low percentage of people that search for an ENS name on Google or Bing was probably indicative of the type of user that responded to my poll. They are crypto natives. If the average person that is not so familiar with what a .eth is becomes aware that someone they know has a .eth name, the question is what platform, if any, will they go to look up information about it? My money is on traditional search engines for now. I guess we’ll see.