Ask HN: What do you think of our new domain name generator?
nametoolkit.com
We know it has been done before, but we think we do it rather differently. Please tell us what you think. All ideas and criticisms are welcome.
nametoolkit.com
I like the interface to show additional (whois, etc) information. Have you had folks purchase any domain names through your affiliate links - or has it mostly been used to come with with crazy combinations of words?
domaintyper.com is one of my new favourites and I was aware of domai.nr but found it too minimalist to be useful to me, and some minor ones you'll get through Google , or DuckDuckGo :).
Actually one of the things I learned on the project was how poorly I'd initally researched the market. There are far more competitors than I thought in this space. Many are proof of concept or prepend adjectives, some are more advanced. We are trying to be creative and we're coming up with most algorithms and UI concepts from scratch out of necessity as we're not hugely impressed with what we've seen elsewhere.
Yes we have made sales, I won't divulge the number, safe to say, not enough for me to quit my day job but we're moving on much faster than expected. Being an affiliate, as you probably know has it's drawbacks in terms of not being able to track user behaviour once they disappear into the registrar's site.
Name Toolkit doesn't merely attach words to other words randomly, or prepend random words, but if that's how it looked, then we're not doing well enough. We're working to make our search better daily and we hope that will become apparent if you re-visit.
All the best with your efforts.
I notice going back through your post that you say it was a weekend project - we've been coding the algorithm for more than six months, and we have an office set up specially for it, and we are old, qualified, workaholics. Maybe we're slow and dumb... but
Take an couple of examples, 'name toolkit' and 'new site'. You return nothing for nametoolkit, http://nametoolkit.com/suggest?q=name+toolkit&sort=relev.... You return rawposition.com for new site. Hmmmm. Our interface's are almost similar, but our interface is not our product.
I like the way you present the results, but my biggest problem with our site is that we have to only return the top few results for each algorithm, or else we overwhelm the user. We are hoping to approach this by allowing the user to view results by algorithm, and perhaps paginating or adding infinite scroll. For example, our thesaurus has over 100 responses to 'new', and we then filter and rank these by context, using our filtering database that takes a day just to add an index.
We already have twenty hours on the clock for our domain hacks algorithm, and I will be hand-cleaning tables until 2am tonight again.
It's fun though, isn't it?
I agree with not overwhelming the user. Though I think it depends on how your users are individually inspired to find the right domain name. Looking at competitor sites, some allow you to wade through tons of results, others just show you a couple.
We didn't put a lot into the algorithm, so our results are mostly dependent on the thesaurus we are using. I would guess that providing a good results algorithm is definitely the best way to go. Good luck gents!
One interesting approach is what nxDom.com does under their 'advanced options' section. They allow users to create their own custom algorithm for things they care about.
It's interesting, though strangely the site is a bit half-baked. Why get so far and then peter out at the testing and execution?
Domain hacks would be great.
Otherwise - nice interface, very responsive.
Thank you :)
It is 6 stages to grep, sed, diff, sort, uniq, and import the files into our whois db so it will be a couple of days potentially before I track the .01% down.
http://twitter.com/#!/savant/status/24226152759431168
Where do you get the Verisign's list? I was looking around for this when I tweeted that.
1. Our translator is currently switched off. We might add a checkbox to update it. Renualdo? We switched it off because we used google translate, and then cleaned the output (i.e., kill aux, des, della, etc). We are in the process of getting an offline translation kit together though for another project, so that can be added instead in a month or two.
2. We applied through verisign's website and faxed (no kidding - we faxed) our company info. We have a fully registered limited liability (plc) company so it was not too hard. It took about three weeks though to get access.
3. We have thesaurus (clearly) but that is only the start of the fun... and the mispeller is on the list of things to add, after domain hacks. ;)
It would be nice to have simple filters like no hyphens in name and domain length limit. Also, some way of separating unavailable domains will be great.
Hyphens - there is only ever one result.
Separating the unavailable - second person who asked - Renualdo is working on this as I type. (now I must go back to fixing the plurals)
- only shows .com - doesn't show splits or domain hacks (eg del.icio.us) - not clear when I see only orange results if those are unavailable
1. Splits & domain hacks. My partner in crime will be happy you said that - we will add. Prob at least a week though.
2. Orange - yes - means that they are unavailable. We can add a comment to make that more clear. If you click on an orange link, you get a 'more like this' effect where we search with the underlying phrase.
3. .com. Valid point - a bit like the domain hacks I didn't think people were that interested in odd domains so it wasn't rolled out at first. It will be added shortly. Thank you :)
We all like some healthy competition, right? How have you been doing with yours?
Have you got the example and we can look into it?
tl;dr; tool gives tools.
Thanks for the tip.
The idea of showing the taken ones is that they might be close to expiring and valuable to you somehow.
The check box is literally going to arrive in a few minutes... do tell us what you think?...