rogerd - 9:41 pm on Jul 5, 2001 (gmt 0)

I received a reply from new.net on performance of their domains in search engines:

Currently, in order to submit your New.net domain URL into search engines you will need to use the "long" URL. For example, if you own www.pie.shop, you would need to submit it as www.pie.shop.new.net. We are actively pursuing search engine partnerships so that domains can be submitted with the "short" URL. However, there are 2 search engines that were designed specifically for New.net domains. You can submit your domain name to www.run.free and www.newnetsearch.com.

I haven't yet looked for "long domain names" (as new.net calls them) in any search engines, although I would guess the performance of these third (or fourth?) level domains would not be as good as a typical dot-com.