Google quietly added ENS to Search

Searching for an Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain in Google now yields on-chain information about its holdings.

The new functionality in Google Search appears to have been introduced without a formal announcement, and without the knowledge or input from ENS developers, who expressed surprise on X Thursday.

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The search giant has displayed information about Ethereum addresses using their 40 character hexadecimal string since May 2023, but the addition of easily readable ENS addresses appears to be new.

The update has developers wondering about the future utility of ENS domains.

“So if Google is resolving ENS names now, then we are a single field away from them also displaying an affiliated URL as part of the result,” said Sean Murray of Debanked. “And if they do that, then you really could tell someone your .eth name and they could get to your website just through Google, easy.”

ENS has been steadily expanding integrations since launching way back in May 2017 as a project of the Ethereum Foundation.

Currently, domains can only be registered on Ethereum mainnet, however, the system is designed to work with layer-2 networks as well, and can be implemented by dapp developers.

Registration and maintenance of domains incurs costly transaction fees, but managing ENS on a layer-2 will require protocol changes, according to ENS team member serenae.eth.

“It’ll take some significant changes at the core ENS protocol level to allow .eth registrations completely off-chain (on some layer-2), basically the ENS DAO would have to choose a [layer-2] to ‘enshrine’ and tightly couple the [layer-1] registry with,” they wrote on the ENS Discord.

Projects like Uniswap offer free subdomains — e.g. foo.uni.eth however these are not yet resolvable by Google.

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