Good news from our domain suggestion tool: The ".at-Domainfinder" now delivers even better suggestions – and at three times the speed. The tool now also "knows" place names and has a much better understanding of grammar.

 

In the last few weeks, the nic.at R&D team has given the .at-Domainfinder an extensive upgrade. The tool for available .at-domains has not only become significantly faster, but has also received two major functional updates. We talked to R&D Manager Alexander Mayrhofer about the new features.

 

Alex, the .at-Domainfinder now has new features – tell me, what can they do?

Yes, we have been busy in recent weeks and have added two new features. First, some suggestions now include the user's rough location. This results in suggestions such as "sommerkino-radstadt.at" from queries such as "sommerkino.at" – such domains are very popular and successful, especially with companies and organizations with a local market. Secondly, our domain finder now "understands" the suggestions better. We put the search term through a rather complex morphology analysis that shows us the structure of the words.

 

That sounds rather complicated and elaborate. What's the point?

We have taught the domain finder elementary school grammar, so to speak. We can form variants from the results – for example, prefix the suggested domain name with the correct article or the possessive pronoun ("gartenbau.at" then becomes "mygartenbau.at" or "thegartenbau.at") or affirmatory adjectives . This is how domains like "the-greatest-marketing.at" are created. Such combinations are very popular with the user.

 

Don't these data analyses also make the whole thing slower? Users quickly become impatient as soon as a search takes a little longer ...

We initially assumed that this would be the case, but we were able to achieve a great deal in optimizing the speed. As a result, the new version of the .at-Domainfinder is not slower, but almost three times faster than before. The response time is now about 60 ms – for anything below about 110 ms, humans do not perceive any delay.

 

That sounds promising - after all, the time factor is becoming increasingly important.

Exactly, nobody likes to wait! We notice that visitors rarely take the first suggestion right away, because the quick answers tempt them to experiment further. This leads to a domain that is more appealing, better suited to the business idea, and subsequently retained longer. We often see that visitors register several of the suggestions at once. That shows us that we are on the right track.

 

Let's talk briefly about using the .at-Domainfinder. There is an API, right?

Right. On the one hand, we use the domain finder on our own website, of course, but the function can be implemented very quickly on any website – the API is simple, well documented and publicly usable. It’s great that we can actually measure success: We see that visitors are very happy to use this option and that the suggestions are actually registered ... as mentioned before, often more than one.

 

You can find the .at-Domainfinder and the documentation for the API at .at-Domainfinder.