Registrars can integrate technology to find relevant domain names.
New top level domain name company Donuts announced the release of a free domain search tool called Relevant Name Search (RNS) today.
Many domain name registrars aren’t very good at offering relevant results to domain search queries. This is particularly the case when it comes to top level domain names that have a specific meaning. RNS is designed to fix that.
While Donuts’ goal in making the tool available to domain name registrars is obviously to help sell more domains under new top level domains, the company says the free name spinner is registry-neutral.
I tested the beta version of the tool while it was live on Name.com and found its results to be fairly good. This week I tested it for three searches and compared it to GoDaddy, which I know has invested significantly in search. Here are the results:
There are a few things to note:
1. I turned on “availability checking” on RNS so that it would compare fairly to GoDaddy which (for the most part) won’t show unavailable domains. With availability checking off the Donuts tool returned .com/.net on some of my searches.
2. I ignored premium listings and results marked as “ad” on GoDaddy’s results.
3. GoDaddy returned the odd domain TexassCoffee.com the first time I searched but replaced it with TexasCoffee.menu the second time.
So which service returns better results? I can’t pass a complete judgment. After all, registrars optimize for different things. GoDaddy is surely optimizing for both conversions and total revenue and I’m not privy to its data.
Also, GoDaddy isn’t Donuts’ target market with this tool. The target market is domain registrars that haven’t invested significant engineering resources into domain search.
It seems that Donuts’ tool does a great job of returning semantically relevant domain names.
Nick says
Don’t you think GoDaddy results were better for your enterprise software test? EnterpriseSoftware.us and EnterpriseSoftware.tech are usable , unlike extra long names like EnterpriseSoftware.engineer , EnterpriseSoftware.us is the best name up there since most people wouldn’t even think Enterprise.Software is a domain.
Andrew Allemann says
Probably. I didn’t think to check if Donuts tool works with ccTLDs.
Jane Doe says
Enterprise.software should definitely be shown as it is up to the individual to decide if it fits them and is an exact match within search parameters.
There are people who don’t know .us .net or .org are legitimate extensions, this shouldn’t be a reason not to show availability.
Nick says
Not in the USA kid. Millions of people have a @comcast.net email address here. People know those are real domains here.
Henry says
It seems to me that each optimized their search for their target market and audience. Relevance here depends on your preference between the established gtlds and the newtlds.
For me, I will prefer Godaddy results since they show results with the gtlds if they are available whereas Donuts results seem to be skewed towards newtlds for the most part.
Perhaps, I am biased since I do not have any interest in majority if not all of the newtlds anymore.
ThcNames says
GD knows what people want to buy, not new gTLDs. 🙂