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Ask HN: What do you think of our new domain name generator?
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.
- arepb 16y agoIt's fast, but a few things I have an issue with: - 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
- hessenwolf 16y agoNot quite in order... 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 :)
- yuvadam 16y agoLots of domains show up available when they're not. Domain hacks would be great. Otherwise - nice interface, very responsive.
- hessenwolf 16y agoOuch. Using Verisign's domain files - I will check what went wrong - I assume I misread them. Thank you :)
- hessenwolf 16y agoBug identified... almost fixed.
- renualdo 16y agofixed, although the availability checks are offline, this is by design, checking the availability inline is just a horrible experience, even using batched Asynchronous lookups. Perhaps we can do something similar to Skyscanner and do the check only if you're interested in a particular domain.
- hessenwolf 16y agoUpdate: Found another anomaly. Whois needs to be offline for performance reasons. We will refine it - but it should be 99.9% correct now. 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.
- Charuru 16y agoShow 2 columns, separate the orange and the blue, so I don't have to look at the unavailable.
- renualdo 16y agoI was thinking of having a show/hide taken domains checkbox above the list and/or a site-wide preference if you never, ever want to see the taken ones. The idea of showing the taken ones is that they might be close to expiring and valuable to you somehow.
- Charuru 16y agoWell yes, I do think that unavailable domains can be sometimes useful, that's why I said separate into 2 columns.
- hessenwolf 16y agoHmmm... problem with the two columns is my android phone, and my partner's iphone. We don't want to have to rejig things. The check box is literally going to arrive in a few minutes... do tell us what you think?...
- renualdo 16y agoI've added the option to hide taken domains. Hope you like it, I went for a checkbox as it could be done more quickly than anything else I could think of but it works reasonably well.
- code_duck 16y agoI like how it searches synonyms and homophones. One thing you might add is plurals.
- hessenwolf 16y agoWe are pluralising nouns only - but the selection of nouns is limited by our grammar db. It should have been around 4th/5th result, depending on the number of search words. Have you got the example and we can look into it?
- code_duck 16y agoSure, the word 'tool' doesn't yield any result with 'tools'.
- hessenwolf 16y agoVoila. Yeah - our grammar db had a really limited list of plurals. Now I just find everything word where a variant exists ending in 's' or 'es' from our everywordevereverever table (not called that). tl;dr; tool gives tools.
- sandipagr 16y agoIt's good work. Coming up with a name is the hardest part. 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.
- hessenwolf 16y agoWe can add a sort by domain length - you will get a completely different sequence of results. At the moment it is sorted by top n results from each algorithm (eight algos so far). 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)
- josegonzalez 16y ago"There should be a domain name lookup service that combines a thesaurus, misspeller, and translator" http://twitter.com/#!/savant/status/24226152759431168 http://twitter.com/#!/savant/status/24226152759431168 Where do you get the Verisign's list? I was looking around for this when I tweeted that.
- hessenwolf 16y agoHi, 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. ;)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- renualdo 16y agoI'd just like to add that largestmeat.com is also available: http://nametoolkit.com/registrars?domain=largestmeat&tld=com&source=input http://nametoolkit.com/registrars?domain=largestmeat&tld... Might have me that myself :)
- hessenwolf 16y agoAnd so is crazyfuckingawesome.com http://nametoolkit.com/suggest?q=fucking+awesome&hide_taken=1 http://nametoolkit.com/suggest?q=fucking+awesome&hide_ta...
- hessenwolf 16y agoWe just got a bang operator on duckduckgo for our new domain name generator. Awesome.
- jusob 16y agoit looks very similar to mine (http://domain-generator.us/ http://domain-generator.us/), but for .COM only: synonyms, different combinations of names, etc. Someone posted a list of domain name generators on this forum a while ago (cannot find the link), there are a lot of sites that offer similar functions. You might want to focus on that other do not have to stand out.
- hessenwolf 16y agoYes - we have seen it, and a few others. Try some queries in ours, and some queries in yours, and you will see that we use quite a different set of algorithms although there is some overlap. We all like some healthy competition, right? How have you been doing with yours?
- GertG 16y agoYou might want to correct the typo in the second heading: How to I use it?
- hessenwolf 16y agoThe thing about the internet is that it is so publically humiliating. Now I know that that is there and don't clock off the day job for another few hours. Thanks for the tip.
- hessenwolf 16y agoAnd she's fixed.
- richpalmer2 16y agoLooks similar to the project I announced last week (http://rewordio.us http://rewordio.us) here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118240 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118240 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?
- nt_mark 16y agoHi Rich, I've never seen your site before, I have very little free time, and I use it to code more than read the news. Your site isn't bad.. it's not the best I've seen and not the worst either, which is similar to how I'd currently rate ours. 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.
- hessenwolf 16y agoHi from me too Rich, 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=relevance 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?