

Ask HN: What do you think of our new domain name generator? - hessenwolf
http://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.
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richpalmer2
Looks similar to the project I announced last week (<http://rewordio.us>)
here: <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
Hi 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
Hi 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=relev...](http://nametoolkit.com/suggest?q=name+toolkit&sort=relevance).
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?

~~~
richpalmer2
You should definitely reserve that name! Maybe through our site? :)

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.

~~~
hessenwolf
Wow - they get the minimalism thing, alright. domain-atrix is actually a
pretty good result for domain - and I am not sure how they are doing that.

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?

------
yuvadam
Lots of domains show up available when they're not.

Domain hacks would be great.

Otherwise - nice interface, very responsive.

~~~
hessenwolf
Bug identified... almost fixed.

~~~
renualdo
fixed, 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
Update: 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.

------
josegonzalez
"There should be a domain name lookup service that combines a thesaurus,
misspeller, and translator"

<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
Hi,

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. ;)

------
sandipagr
It'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
We 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)

------
arepb
It'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
Not 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 :)

~~~
renualdo
Told you man, it's all about the domain hacks these days :), seriously though,
noone really wants a .net do they?

~~~
code_duck
Only if they want clari.net or bassi.net, I guess?

------
jusob
it looks very similar to mine (<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
Yes - 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?

------
code_duck
I like how it searches synonyms and homophones. One thing you might add is
plurals.

~~~
hessenwolf
We 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
Sure, the word 'tool' doesn't yield any result with 'tools'.

~~~
hessenwolf
Voila. 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.

------
GertG
You might want to correct the typo in the second heading: How to I use it?

~~~
hessenwolf
The 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
And she's fixed.

------
hessenwolf
We just got a bang operator on duckduckgo for our new domain name generator.
Awesome.

------
Charuru
Show 2 columns, separate the orange and the blue, so I don't have to look at
the unavailable.

~~~
renualdo
I 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
Well yes, I do think that unavailable domains can be sometimes useful, that's
why I said separate into 2 columns.

~~~
hessenwolf
Hmmm... 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?...

