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Comment by e1ven | Hacker News Reader

It's very good at iterating on a name that I'm already thing about, but not very good at going beyond what I've already considered.

Consider if I were writing a new Email package. I might tell your tool "Mail" or "Message"

As great as LDS is, it's going to give me "GetMessage.com" or "HiveMail.com" not anything like Pegasus Mail, Cyrus, or Hermes.

Those are much more creative names!

These are all stories about mail delivery, to an extent, but any computerized system is going to have a hard time with it.

The best that I suspect could easily do would by synonyms - If I give it Dark, it could suggest Black and Dusk, and give me names using those..

But I'd love to see something with a less direct connection.

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Hey, thanks for your thoughts.

So you know, LDS does list synonyms on the right side of the search results page, which should help to some extent. Searching for "mail" wouldn't turn up Pegasus Mail, though I could add "pegasus+" to the search results and it would. There's a balance fine line between including a variety of results and including poor results and I need to be careful not to cross it. Any recommendations?

Sorry, I think I was being obtuse.

I don't think the problem is that you don't have enough generic words to add to either side. I think the problem is that all your doing is adding words to either side ;)

I like your site. It's really useful to get the low-hanging-fruit.

But for instance, Cyrus is a awesome name for a Mail program, because Cyrus the great is credited with the creation of the first postal service.

That doesn't mean that CyrusCoupons is a good name ;)

Many names are good because of the metaphors they invoke, or because of the story associated with that character, place or object.

"Teapot 3d" would be a great name, because it's a Teapot is a traditional object to render. Lena is a great name for image manipulation, because of.. http://www.ecogito.net/articles/lena.html

Again, I think your site is great for what it is, but a lot of my favorite names.. Really great names.. come from much more oblique or abstract approaches, for that particular problem. These don't generalize well, by their very nature.

Does that make sense?

Makes a lot of sense.

There's a lot of smart folks on here... can anyone think of a way to algorithmically come up with domains like Colin is describing?

Do you have info on related sites (e.g. site X and Y are direct competitors?) If you do, you can use that for word clustering and find classes of related words. For example, if you have a set of 250 email providers, you might see "mail" and "email" a lot more than for domains in other categories, but you might also see something more subtle, like "postman" or "contact" or etc. Probably not as subtle (and cool) as Cyrus, but at least heading in the right direction.

Another idea: get a dump of Wikipedia and do a TF-IDF analysis on all of the words. When someone types "mail", you look at wikipedia.org/Mail and look for the most unique words. As it happens, the Mail article does mention Cyrus the Great, so as long as Cyrus is a pretty rare word in the corpus, it might be a suggestion you can make.

That said, there is such a thing as too clever. If I typed in "mail" as a domain search query you told me to create the website "CyrusMail", I would wonder what the heck that was all about because I don't happen to know the relationship between mail and Cyrus the Great.

For finding generically related words, maybe the wordnik API? http://www.wordnik.com/words/mail#related

More abstract relationships (mail -> Cyrus, image -> Lenna) might be gleaned by crawling Wikipedia.

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