Upgrading Your Sales Process: Domain Search 2.0

Today we announced significant improvements to the speed and quality of domain searches conducted using OpenSRS. With these enhancements, your existing integrations will work faster, as will searches using the Reseller Web Interface. But what I’m really excited about is the continued improvements we have made to our domain search over the past two years, which now allows you to offer an advanced domain searching system that will increase sales of both domains and other web hosting services.

A little bit of background

The methodology I refer to as “domain search 1.0” is unfortunately employed by most web hosting companies today. It is an old, archaic way of thinking about domain search. Common symptoms include:

Forcing potential customers to enter ‘www.yourname.com’ search strings;
Not allowing customers to register ccTLDs, or even gTLDs not named .com, .net or .org;
The absence of suggestions for related search terms.

The most common objection I hear from web hosting companies is they don’t see any value in paying attention to domain name search, until I explain domain search 2.0.

Domain search 2.0

The domain search 2.0 approach treats domain names like the key component they are to the web hosting sales process. Virtually every web hosting company puts domain search front and centre on their website, but the technology used to power the search is often archaic. Domain search 2.0, on the other hand, treats the domain search box like a “magic box” – that is, an open, free-text box that will accept any input and spit out highly relevant domain names.

Our research shows this not only greatly enhances the end user experience, but can lead to a 10 to 15 percent lift in domain name sales if implemented properly. It also results in sales of more value-added services by attracting higher-margin customers.

How does it work?

The key to domain search 2.0 is our powerful NAME_SUGGEST call, which we’ve been iterating upon for more than two years. After our announcement today, it contains four key components:

Domain name lookup: The “lookup” parameter will take any text and turn it into a domain name search, whether you enter “www.hockey.com”, “hockey league” or “hockey@league.com”.
Domain name suggestions: The “suggestion” parameter will quickly return results of available names based on the original query using technology from DomainsBot, the industry leader in domain search technology. A new feature now allows you to also specify language if you choose to do so, enabling results to be returned in English, French, Spanish or Italian. Our research now shows that up to 15 percent of registrations using domain search 2.0 are from our domain name suggestions.
Premium names: The “premium” parameter checks our premium names database of over one million names to see if any related names are for sale on the domain name aftermarket. As of today, suggested premium names are also displayed by DomainsBot, leading to a much better search experience.
Personal names: A new “personal” parameter also allows you to now search for names associated with our personal names service as well.

We’ve also baked in a new “max_wait_time” parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that the NAME_SUGGEST command can run, and return as many results as can be found in that time period. This will allow you to build real-time, AJAX-enabled domain searches if you choose to do so.

Putting it all together

Have you thought about your domain search lately? We now have the speed, tools and data to equip your business with a high-powered search that will lead to more sales. There’s more information on our website.

Looking for some more techie information about the new API?

Look no further! Read this post and see some code examples. And to dig even deeper, the Developers/API Forum is the place to be.

Possibly related posts:

http://www.domainsnext.com mansour elseify

All multilingual domain names share one thing in common:

They start with the English letters ?XN?, are followed by 2 + dashes, and are followed by a combination of letters and/or numbers preceding the ..com or .net.

Example:

??????.com (xn--igb2a4cg0ab.com) (Translated in from Arabic to English ?
?American?) This domain name was registered on 11/03/2009.

In the past couple of weeks Tucows has changed the search functionality for domain availability. As a direct result of that, if you search for the same domain name from our example above, the search result will say that the domain name is available, since the search result suppresses the dashes and gives you the domain name without dashes. If the domain name is registered by a customer relying on the search result, without noticing that the dashes have been suppressed, the customer will register a domain name that has no meaning or relation to the multilingual domain name he is attempting to register. Manipulating the search result, assuming that the customer who is trying to register a domain name that includes dashes does not know what is good for him, defeats the logic of the domain registration and leads to a faulty registration of multilingual domains.

i suggest that all multilingual registration be suspended until the issue is resolved. The puny code produced through the search is incorrect for all multilingual registrations. This will lead customers to think that they have registered a certain foreign language domain name when in fact they are registering meaningless unusable alphabetical and numerical characters with no meaning.
Heather Leson

Hi Mansour, The Development team confirmed that this is fixed. Let Support or myself know if you have any more questions,

Heather

Upgrading Your Sales Process: Domain Search 2.0

Looking for some more techie information about the new API?

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