|
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? |
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.