Four patent applications provide method of domain name valuation and domain suggestions.
Domain name registrar GoDaddy has filed four patent applications related to domain name appraisals and spinning.
The applications list Paul Nicks, who is Director of Product Development for GoDaddy’s auction service, as inventor. They were filed in February 2010 and just published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today.
The domain name appraisal portion (pdf) of the patents describes a system of valuing a domain name based on “5 Ps”:
Precision – may include the number of distinct keywords found, the length of the name and the number of keywords found in the dictionary.
Popularity – may include various search engine search result metrics and tracking of words searched per month.
Presence – may include the age of the domain, and the rank of the web site according to web ranking services or software.
Pattern – may include the number of premium characters, the part of speech (such as noun, plural noun, verb, adjective, etc., possibly considering if the domain is a one word domain), the relationship of vowels and consonants etc. (possibly considering if the domain is a 4-5 character word).
Pay-Per-Click – may include the maximum number of pay-per-click bids from various advertising tracking services or software, and the number of ads returned within search engine searches.
Then a “dynamic multiplier” based on registration statistics for each of several top level domains (TLDs) may then be applied to the domain evaluation to determine domain scarcity.
The spinning portion of patents is for taking a domain submission, extracting its elements, and suggesting a number of available domain names.
George Kirikos says
GoDaddy appraisals are utter garbage (as are most appraisals). They appraised one of my two-letter .com domains at “$5,040 – $13,104” LOL
Tell me where I can find *any* two-letter .com domains at that price (and that appraisal was last year) and I’ll buy them all day long.
Of course, then they give their customers false hope that they can use the “Domain Buy” service with a $300 opening offer to get one of those elite domains.
James says
George beat me to it – whatever Godaddy use for their appraisals isn’t worth patenting. In any case, I doubt they can prove novelty for picking numbers out of a hat.
Jay says
Let’s just face it Godaddy is all around full of crap! Almost everything this company does is NOT to better business with its customers but to destroy it’s relationship.. The average consumer would believe anything if it sounds like a good deal to them.
If consumer’s were smart they wouldn’t do business with this company except to acquire, sell and buy domains at the lowest possible cost.. Most services this company offers is not worth buying in the first place especially “the domain appraisal service” Its a waste of time and enrgy
Tom Jackson says
That’s funny. We have been doing the appraisal methodology AND the name spinning methodology for over ten years…
tj
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