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Finding Great Domain Names with Mechanical Turk
- pclark 17y agogenius idea - I eagerly await Hacker News discount on accounts ;)
- matt1 17y agoThe Hacker News discount was around three months ago when it launched and was free :)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- terpua 17y agoMatt, your site is crawling :( Perhaps you're getting to many HITs :)
- matt1 17y agoNice pun! I've been very happy with Dreamhost, but the shared hosting does present problems when there is a lot of traffic. It's a good problem to be having...
- devin 17y agoDreamHost? Uh oh... Methinks you aren't getting 1/1,000th of the hits you could be. DreamHost = dog slow with two concurrent connections to a fairly light rails app, in my experience. Please tell me you're running a VPS with them or something. You might want to consider switching hosts before you lose anymore of these hits.
- brk 17y agoIt's a good problem to be having Provided that you do something about the problem before your users become irritated at the response times...
- asb 17y agoI agree with the others - please look into fixing this. A Linode VPS is great at $20 a month, many others here will vouch for Slicehost. I like the idea of domainpigeon, but on the three times I've visited and tried to use it I've had an awful experience. Soon after I start to navigate the site, I find it becomes too slow to be usable. On a different note, I'd prefer it if Twitter names weren't mixed in with domains in the default view - perhaps it's just me, but my first priority when browsing domainpigeon is finding domains. The fact the site can be incredibly slow makes this worse, as switching to 'domains only' can be painful.
- devin 17y agoI have to say that if this weren't HN, your site was posted, and it timed out, I would never come back again. I mean no disrespect; I really like your idea, but going to a site these days and timing out makes the company look like it runs out of a cardboard box with a 2400 baud modem. How many people trust their credit card information to a site with slow response times. Finally I would say that your response to the slow site was rather disconcerting as well. You seem optimistic, like it's no big deal-- When users are having trouble using your product you need to sound concerned and proactive, not lazy and optimistic.
- matt1 17y agoGreat points and you're absolutely right. It is a big deal--half the posts in this thread are about how slow the site is. Even now when I load the home page it occasionally says page not found. I'm losing visitors and missing out on potential customers. 99% of the time Dreamhost is fantastic as the site doesn't receive enough traffic to be a problem. Unfortunately, its the 1% that's the most important and we're seeing the results of that right now.
- GiraffeNecktie 17y agoDoes anyone else find it ironic that the site selling the idea that you need a short (<6 letter) domain has a 12-letter domain name (domainpigeon.com)?
- matt1 17y agoThe key is for the domain to be memorable. If you stick two words together, especially ones that normally don't belong together, like domain and pigeon, you make it memorable. If you don't stick two words together and you want something more... web 2.0ish... then you're much better off sticking with something short than something long.
- wtdominey 17y agoThe "guest" links don't work.
- matt1 17y agoCan you clarify which one you mean?
- ericb 17y agoFor me, I tried to follow the link for domain names sorted by pronouncability and they did not work. I assume this is what OP meant. ------------------- link href: http://www.domainpigeon.com/domains?length=6&sort_by=pronounceability http://www.domainpigeon.com/domains?length=6&sort_by=pro... error: Oops! That Page Doesn't Exist You may have mistyped the address or the page may have moved. Please contact support@domainpigeon.com if you have any questions or concerns.
- matt1 17y agoThe site is very slow and is causing errors. If you get a page load error, just hit refresh in a few seconds. Lesson learned...
- tomerico 17y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but the costs for the Amazon assignment were over 100$ for 4 people ranking pronounciability for 2 minutes each (On average). Meaning over 25$ for a 2 minutes (Lousy?) job...
- cschneid 17y agoNot quite. There are 2360 individual tasks. Each one would take no more than 15 seconds, perhaps a bit more. Spread those across the several hundred people that are on MTurk at any given time, and you can get done in 2 minutes. The 4 multiplier comes because as you said, each individual task is fairly unreliable for quality. He's testing each individual domain name across 4 people (not the same 4 people each time).
- mseebach 17y agoThere were 2300 2-minute assignments, at $0.04 each.
- dood 17y agoJust clicked the register link [https://www.domainpigeon.com/users/register https://www.domainpigeon.com/users/register], got "Internal server error" with a load of info and a backtrace, which I imagine you don't want to display.
- matt1 17y agoThanks for the pointer. I've been working with Dreamhost to fix the Internal Server Errors, which plague the site. Next time no shared hosting.
- tezza 17y ago* Swear words & Double Entendre Maybe a good check would be :: Does this sound like a swear word in your language? A Swedish guy at EuroDjango con said the Finnish chosen domain http://muutu.com http://muutu.com is a very bad swear word in Swedish. * Checking pronouncability values are correct Is there a sanity check step? Can you inspect some results to check that the Mechanical Turks are not just piping in /dev/random to the results?
- matt1 17y agoThe results show you how many seconds the worker took to answer the question. You could also do some statistical analysis on the answers compared to the other people who worked on the same HIT.
- tezza 17y ago$std_human_interval=45 while true; do sleep $std_human_interval curl "http://mechanicalturk/answer?value=`random_gen`" od
- nop 17y agoI don't see how that domain sound or looks anything like a swear word in Swedish. The closest thing I can think of is mutta but it's quite a stretch and they aren't pronounced the same at least not in any English accent I can think of. There are however plenty English words that resemble or is profanity in Swedish, we don't really take notice. Like kiss is the word for urine in Swedish, yet people don't raise eyebrows or giggle (or really notice) when they watch a romantic English movie or anything.
- BRadmin 17y agoWhere are the majority of these workers located and does that influence their pronounceability ratings?
- matt1 17y agoCan't say what the demographics are of the ones who completed these HITS, but of the people that complete the polls, something like 80%+ are US.
- asciilifeform 17y agoCreativity is hard. Let's go shopping!
- anigbrowl 17y agoAutomated namespace pollution. Wonderful :-|