Domainr - blog

VeriSign, Quoted

Funniest (emphasis mine) and simultaneously most impressive quote from VeriSign's 2008/Q4 report:

"VeriSign processed peak loads of nearly 50 billion Domain Name System (DNS) queries per day in the fourth quarter of 2008, resulting in hundreds of millions of Internet users accessing Web sites or sending email. The VeriSign DNS continued to maintain operational accuracy and stability for 100 percent of the time during the fourth quarter of 2008, as it has for the past 11 years. VeriSign’s unique capability to operate global networks of this nature at this scale and reliability remains unparalleled."

It's good to know that people are accessing web sites and sending email.

But sarcasm aside, 11 years of 100% uptime is pretty damn impressive.

123-reg on ccTLDs

We dig UK registrar 123-reg's writeup on why you should consider using country-code domains for your sites; here are a few of their reasons:

• it shows that you're aware and serious about international markets
• they can be used defensively against typo-squatters
• they can help with SEO

One of the main reasons we built Domainr was to increase exposure to country-code domains, of which we're (obviously) huge fans—you don't need a .com to have a successful site.

Feeds, or Domainr API 0.1

ydnar just gave Domainr a bit more sauce—its search results now output in Atom and RSS (example).

Why? Good question. The answer’s probably somewhere between, “Why not?” and, “Django made it too easy not to.”

While we’re unsure of the actual usefulness of feeds in Domainr, we’re hoping they'll prove interesting and/or worthwhile in unforeseen ways. For example, you could toss a Domainr feed into Pipes or Google’s Feed API and mix it up with other data.

If you cook something up with Domainr’s feeds, leave a comment and let us know about it!

New gTLDs: It's the Content, not the Conduit

Domainr is agnostic toward controversial issues like ICANN's proposal to sell new generic top-level domains. Domainr covers the entire domain namespace, and we'll support new TLDs if and when they launch. Domain Name Wire's got great coverage of the issue, and we agree that:

• there doesn't seem to be real demand for new gTLDs
• IDN's continued rollout is more important than new ASCII TLDs
• competing with .com is a marketing problem, not a process problem

I remember reading in Wired long, long ago that it's the content, not the conduit, that matters. This is true for domains—they're merely a conduit for displaying content and services to potential visitors, an address where your offering lives. If you've got great content and a good user experience, you can use any domain and still succeed.

Domainr and Mechanical Turk

Inspired by Andy Baio's mturk hacking and documentation, we used Mechanical Turk to round up the dataset with which we originally launched Domainr.

Our goal was to gather a canonical list of second-level domains available at each top-level domain (for example, .ac's list), to be parsed by Domainr's search engine. Three sets of workers compiled lists for us, ensuring that we shipped with accurate data—they scoured Wikipedia and NICs for SLDs.

Unfortunately it takes some familiarity with the domain namespace to know exactly what to look for when poking around foreign-language NIC sites, so we still needed to manually review a chunk (~7%) of the mturk results. But mturk's data was comprehensive and accurate enough to launch with, which was our goal.

Eritrea Domains

After Domainr had been live for a few weeks, Cameron did some digging in the logs to see what was happening. It turns out that Eritrea's TLD, .er, was the most searched-for domain in our system.

We didn't know anything about Eritrea other than the fact that it's geographically wedged between Ethiopia and the Sudan on the Red Sea. We knew from our prior research that it's almost impossible to register a .er domain.

This is incredibly unfortunate. Here's the most popular TLD in Domainr, at which people would presumably be registering domains if they could, providing another revenue stream for a country that could definitely use it. But there's no practical way to register them.

We emailed .er's whois technical contact and got the following in reply:

hello,

thank you for your inquiry about registering a domain under the ER top level domain. i am the technical contact for the ER top level domain.

currently, domain registrations are restricted to subdomains under .org.er, .com.er, and .ind.er. these domains are currently limited to businesses or persons actually in Eritrea and application for a domain name must be made in person.

to register one of these domain names under ER, you must talk to the administrative contact...

if you are in Eritrea, you can also contact one of the ISP's in Eritrea, who may be able to facilitate this process for you.

second level domains (domains directly under .ER) are not currently available, but there have been discussions about changing this policy. no decision has yet been reached. i've added you to a list of people to contact if a new policy is established.

Coincidentally, India's .in was the second most popular TLD being searched for in Domainr, and India has a well-developed program for registering domains there. It'd be great to someday see a similar system in place for countries like Eritrea.

Domainr and the Aftermarket

Domainr does a great job helping people find new domain names. But what if a domain's already been registered? That's a likely possibility, given that hundreds of millions of domains are registered every year. It turns out there's a vast aftermarket of domains for sale, so we did some digging to see how we could integrate aftermarket availability into Domainr.

Since we're hackers, we almost dove right into implementation—it's a straightforward engineering project, its UI needs are minimal, and commissions from aftermarket referrals are high (usually 25%). But it occurred to us that if we did a bit of log analysis, we could see if Domainr's users are actually searching for domains available in the aftermarket. Afterall, why implement the feature if it'd never be used? And if it'd never be used, we could certainly spend that engineering time on more meaningful projects.

App Engine conveniently keeps logs of all Domainr's searches, and the aftermarket feeds list their respective inventories, so we simply needed to look for matches. Cameron crunched the data, and here's what we discovered:

• Domainr: ~12,000 unique searches from 2009-01-05 through 2009-02-04
• Aftermarket: ~850,000 unique domains, from feeds downloaded on 2009-02-10 (unfortunately their feeds seem to only list auctions ending soon, not their entire inventory. We checked Afternic, GoDaddy Auctions, NameJet, Pool, Sedo and SnapNames.)
• Intersects: 23 domains from Domainr's search logs appeared in the aftermarket feed corpus.
  • 22 of these were simply expiring and (we're assuming) available at default prices via the aftermarkets' auto-whois crawling.
  • 1 domain was actually for sale—by a person—in the aftermarket.

Though the one match was a €50,000 auction (and could certainly net us a nice commission—highly unlikely given the apparent price), we concluded that:

• Aftermarket/Domainr integration can wait, because Domainr's current userbase definitely isn't looking for domains listed there.
• We'll crunch the data again from time to time to see if this changes.
• A simple UI change (already live) lets users know that the aftermarket exists, so they can manually check if the domain they're looking for is available there. Even better, Sedo has a brokerage service that will track down an already-registered domain's owner if they'd like to pursue buying it.

FAQ: How does Domainr make money?

Domainr makes money via affiliate relationships with domain registrars. For example, if you click the Register link and end up buying a domain from one of these registrars, we'll get a small percentage of this amount for referring you to them. It's quite nice of them to do this!

Domainr 'round the tubes

Domainr's been getting some linkage lately from 'round the blogs:

• Barbarian Group: our friend Noah gave Domainr props on both his personal and work blogs. Rock!
• NameThis: somebody's looking for a domain for their geotagging-related site, and reckons Domainr can help.
• crush3r: Ericson snagged robo.to with Domainr's help!
• Agitationist: considers Domainr one of his five favorite domain tools.

Web Sites Explained: Simply

Our friend Buster just posted a nice little writeup about how web sites work, as part of a meme titled, "try to explain something difficult that you're familiar with."

His step 1 is Register a domain, and he very kindly links to Domainr. I'd suggest doing these things in a slightly different order, however:

1. Start a weblog on a service like Blogger—it's free, takes just a minute or two, and lets you use your own domain name for free. It functions as the hosting service Buster mentions.
2. Register a domain, and map it to the blogging service.
3. There is no step 3!