Donuts releases free TLD-neutral name-spinner
Kevin Murphy, January 24, 2018, Domain Services
Donuts has announced the release of a free name-spinner tool for registrars and resellers.
Relevant Name Search, found at rns.domains, isn't a destination site in itself, but will be free for registrars to integrate into their storefronts.
The company said it's been in beta testing with eNom, Dreamhost, Dynadot and Name.com, with eNom using it for over a year.
The service recalls something similar released by Verisign.
However, unlike the Verisign NameStudio tool, Donuts said RNS is "registry-neutral", meaning it's not designed to plug its own portfolio of TLDs over those from other registries.
I subjected the service to a quick, non-scientific test today and found the results much more semantically relevant than the Verisign tool, which only returns .com, .net and .cc results.
When I used NameStudio in November to search for "vodka", my best offering was dogvodka.com. With RNS, I was offered the likes of vodka.bar, vodka.rocks, vodka.party, vodka.social and vodka.trade (all of which appear to carry premium pricing).
While Verisign offered me funattorney.com on a search for "attorney", Donuts offered up attorney.lawyer, attorney.lgbt and attorney.blog.
RNS does not ignore legacy gTLDs, however. Doing a search for something a little more niche will bring up .com and .net domains, appropriately (in my view) ranked.
Search for "birmingham taxi" and you'll get three relevant .limo domains (yeah, .limo exists, apparently) before birminghamtaxi.net.
Similarly, if you want to open up a pizza place in Cardiff, search for "cardiff pizza" and you'll get offered cardiff.pizza, cardiffpizza.menu, cardiffpizza.restaurant, cardiffpizza.cafe and cardiffpizza.delivery before you get to cardiffpizza.com.
Many domain investors would say that the .com is unarguably the superior domain (it's also unregistered and non-premium), but even those people would have to admit that the five more prominent suggestions have more semantic relevance.
Donuts said that RNS is configurable to take into account TLD-specific promotions, geography and marketing campaigns, and that it can be integrated with a single API call.
DomainsBot to be "at the heart" of new gTLD sales
Kevin Murphy, July 1, 2013, Domain Registrars
DomainsBot, which powers the name suggestion feature on most major registrar storefronts, has unveiled a significant update designed to make selling new gTLD domains easier.
The company reckons its new technology will soon be promoted from a follow-up sales tool, rolled out if a customer's first choice of domain is not available, to "replacing the availability check" entirely.
"The idea is to be at the heart of the process of promoting new gTLDs," CEO Emiliano Pasqualetti told DI.
The idea is pretty straightforward: a customer types a word into a search box, the service suggests available domain names with conceptually similar TLDs.
There's a demo online already. If you type "chocolate", it suggests domains such as chocolate.food, chocolate.menu and chocolate.health. Domain Name Wire did a quick test run today too.
While it may not be perfect today, it was pretty good at finding appropriate TLDs for the keywords I tested.
And Pasqualetti said that under the hood is a machine learning engine that will make its suggestions increasingly more relevant as new gTLD domains start to go on sale.
"It tries to predict which TLD we need to show to each individual using a combination of their query, their IP address and as much history as we can legally collect in partnership with registrars," Pasqualetti said.
If, for example, customers based in London show a tendency to buy lots of .london domains but hardly ever .rome, Londoners will start to see .london feature prominently on their registrar's home page.
"We learn from each registrar what people search for and what people end up buying," he said.
Some registrars may start using the software in their pre-registration portals, increasing relevance before anything actually goes on sale, he said.
My feeling is that this technology could play a big role in which new gTLDs live or die, depending on how it is implemented and by which registrars.
Today, DomainsBot powers the suggestion engine for the likes of Go Daddy, eNom, Tucows and Moniker. Pasqualetti reckons about 10% of all the domains being sold are sold via its suggestions.
Judging by today's press release, registrars are already starting to implement the new API. Melbourne IT, Tucows and eNom are all quoted, but Pasqualetti declined to specify precisely how they will use the service.
It's been widely speculated that Go Daddy plans to deploy an automated "pay for placement" system — think AdSense for domains — to determine which TLDs get prominence on its storefront.
Pasqualetti said that's the complete opposite of what DomainsBot is offering.
"We're relevance for placement," he said. "We want to give every TLD a chance to thrive, as long as they're relevant for the end user."
According to Pasqualetti (and most other people I've been talking to recently) there are a lot of new gTLD applicants still struggling to figure out how to market their TLDs via registrars.
There are about 550 "commercially interesting" applied-for gTLD strings in the DomainsBot system right now, he said. New gTLD applicants may want to make sure they're one of them.
Next week, the company will reveal more details about how it plans to work with new gTLD registries specifically.