[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.... 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?

[nt_mark]

I'm not old till I hit 30 man...ages away