> With any of these identifiers, the thing you do instead of just punching the ID into a search engine, is to first search for either 1. the website of the enti

> With any of these identifiers, the thing you do instead of just punching the ID into a search engine, is to first search for either 1. the website of the entity you know owns the thing, or 2. some kind of "catalog" site; and then plug the otherwise-non-unique identifier in there. Your identifier, despite not being unique generally, is unique when put in the context of a domain-specific keyspace. Nit-picky perhaps but DOIs are extremely unlikely to be used elsewhere to mean something else. In a search engine you'll get either the original article or articles that cite it. The reason you'd use something else to get to the article is that there's a single location for all of them to be resolved, and even then people will still just google them. In fact, googling them can be more reliable when they've not been correctly registered. It's not really counter to the general point, they're not useful for products and perhaps I misread your statement but DOIs absolutely work as "just look for this string".