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Finding Great Domain Names with Mechanical Turk

Mazur 3 Comments

(Cross-posted from Domain Pigeon)

Overview

  • Finding great available domain names just got a little bit easier with some help from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk community.
  • The community rated the pronounceability of Domain Pigeon’s entire collection of five and six letter .com domain names.
  • It worked well: Check out the six letter domain names sorted by pronounceability
  • Five is better than six! Sign up for an account to explore all the five letter domain names.
  • Added bonus: To celebrate, we’re adding 1,000 new five letter domain names per day from Monday, May 11 through Friday, May 15, 2009 at 3pm EST.

Background

Anyone that’s attempted to search for an available domain name recently can attest to how hard it is to find a good name. If you’ve ever spent any time on Ajaxwhois.com, you know what I mean. You can futilely sit there for hours typing various combinations of words until you finally get so frustrated that you settle on something that’s long, hyphenated, unpronounceable, and has six to ten numbers tacked on the end. Not exactly your ideal name.

Domain Pigeon was created to help alleviate the pain of finding a good domain name. We find available domain names and then list them on this website so that you can browse them and find ones that appeal to you.

To be clear: it’s not difficult to find available domain names, but it is hard to find good ones. Smack your keyboard against your desk about ten times until you have something that resembles xifs-duodis9.com and chances are you’ll be able to register it. But that’s not what you want. You want something marketable. Something remarkable.

We’ve used various methods to find quality domain names. For example, one way to come up with domain names is to simply add “i” or “e” to the beginning of a word and check whether that domain is available: iPhone.com, ePhone.com, iStore.com, eStore.com, etc. We’ve got plenty of those (‘eSlanting.com,’ anyone?), but that’s not what most people want. Another method is to check every group of five letters within a word, hoping that it produces a decent name. For example, using the word “alphabetic” we could check the availability of alpha.com, lphab.com, phabe.com, habet.com, abeti.com, and betic.com.

When you do that though, you get a lot of garabge like lphab.com. It’s barely pronounceable and when added with the other names it adds a lot of clutter to the site. The problem is that its not that easy for the computer to tell which names are good and which are bad.

Until recently, I’ve simply let the visitors sort it out. I posted everything using the philosophy: Don’t like it? Don’t register it.

A Better Way


I recently saw Mike Culver, an Amazon Web Services evangelist, speak at the Philly Emerging Tech conference. I had heard of Mechanical Turk and knew the concept, but was curious to learn more so I attended his talk on it.

For the unenlightened, Mechanical Turk is, in Amazon’s words, “a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence.” Basically, its a system that enables thousands of people around the world to help you with tasks that computers have a hard time doing. In exchange for their help, you pay them some small amount. For example, its very difficult for computers to analyze the contents of a picture so you could use Mechanical Turk to tag images or to identify pornography (yes: someone will pay you to look at porn).

On the drive home that day I was thinking about ways to use it for Domain Pigeon. Then it hit me: Why not have the workers (the people who complete the tasks) help identify good domain names?

I decided that above all else, pronounceability and length were the two most important characteristics of a good domain name. If you have to spell out any portion of your domain name when telling it to somebody, it’s probably not a good name. Additionally, you want it to be as short as possible. After all, “thisisanawesomedomainnamebutyoudprobablyneverwantit.com” is easy to pronounce, but it’s hard to remember and even harder to type.

So, I went about creating a task (a Human Intelligence Task or HIT in Turk-speak) that would ask people how pronounceable thousands of different words were. The words were made up of domain names that I have already posted or plan to post on Domain Pigeon. I limited the domains to ones that were five or six letters long because alas, there are no available .com domain names less than five letters long.

Here’s a brief summary of what this entailed:

1. Create a template for the HIT:

After a worker completes a task, the person who created the task rates the workers’ performance. The better the workers do the higher their HIT approval rating will be. When you create a task, you can specify a minimum HIT approval rating which will determine the quality of the worker that can work on your task. Generally you want to keep it pretty high so you can reduce the number of garbage answers, but remember that the higher you make it, the less people who will be able to work on your task and the longer it will take to get completed. I lowered it to 0.80 to allow more participants.

As you’ll see in a second, I added 40 domain names per HIT. That means that when someone accepts one of these tasks, they have to rate the pronounceability of 40 words. I set a reward of 4 cents for this grueling task and I also said I wanted each HIT (each group of 40) to be rated 4 times. I wanted several people to rate each domain so I could then average the scores to get a more reliable rating.

2. Design the layout:

You can use their editor to create a layout, or if you’re familiar with HTML you can create your own. A basic knowledge of CSS is also helpful because, well, you should be nice to the workers and it doesn’t take much work to add a little style.

The ${domain1} format is a variable which will be replaced when I upload the data…

3. Upload the data:

When you’re happy with the price and the layout, it’s time to upload the data you want it to use.

For this task I wrote a few lines of code that would pull all of the available five and six letter domain names from my local database and output them as a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file where each row corresponds to the data used in a single HIT.

For this task, there were 40 columns and 590 rows for a total of 23,600 domains.

4. Publish and wait

This is what I see:

This is what the workers see:

5. Export results, analyze

When you’re done you can export the results, which you can them import into Excel and analyze to your heart’s (or rather to your ability’s) content.

Here’s what the analysis looked like for this this task:

The Result

You can now sort five and six letter domain names on Domain Pigeon by pronounceability. While not perfect, it does make it a lot easier to find the cream of the crop domain names on the site.

Guests: Check out the six letter domain names sorted by pronounceability
Members: Also check out the five letter domain names (Not a member? Sign up)

To celebrate the addition of this new feature to Domain Pigeon, we’re adding 1,000 five letter domain names per day for the entire week of 11 May, 2009 through 15 May, 2009.

Enjoy the domain names and happy hunting!

AOL Modal Tool

Mazur 2 Comments

I recently received this email:

I was sitting here yesterday talking with a friend and remembering our own good ole days when Modal Tools by Tau got brought up. We talked about what a great program it was, but how impossible it is find anymore. i stumbled across your archive site and got a small thrill thinking that aol-files.com was actually in existance still/again. i quickly realized it was archived but had to keep reading for nostalgia.

I eventually came to a part that said “if you remember aol-files.com send me an email”. So, heres that email and a shout. And, a small request i hope you might be able to help with. While we may have stopped the childish games, Modal Tool 2.0 still has simple uses and we have been hoping we could find a copy. If you happen to still posess that, it would be great if you could email it to me or just link me to it somewhere. I would greatly appreciate it. And hey, thanks for giving us (once upon a time) aspiring aol hackers neat stuff to play with back in the day.

There was a certain type of window on AOL called a Modal or specifically, “_AOL_Modal”. They looked like this:

Whenever an AOL Modal popped up you had to act on it before you could do anything else with the AOL client. Most windows in the AOL class hierarchy fell under the “AOL Frame25” class, which was basically the entire AOL client. Modal’s were a different breed. They were a separate entity and they could not be moved, resized, or hidden. This is from a tutorial I wrote back in the day on AOL Class Names:

AOL Class Hierarchy circa 2001

Over time people figured out that you could do some interesting things with some of the modal windows.

For example, AOL did not charge you for the time you spent creating a new screen name. They simply disabled the rest of the AOL features until you were out of the area designated for coming up with new names. For people who had unlimited usage billing plans, this didn’t really matter. But at the time (1998ish), a lot of people still paid per hour. Someone figured out that if you simply hid the AOL Modal that was open when you were creating a new screen name, AOL still through you were in the create screen name area but you could still use AOL like normal.

Clever, huh? I seem to recall that AOL sued the guy who popularized this method of avoiding charges, but that may have just been a rumor.

Modal Tool was a small program written in Visual Basic that made it easier for people to figure out how to do things like that. It let you explore the contents of AOL Modals (they often had hidden controls), disable them, hide them, etc. I think it was a fairly widespread tool within the AOL hacker community at the time.

Here’s what it looked like:

Not sure if it works on newer versions of AOL (the last time I used it was around 2001), but you’re welcome to download it if you want to play around with it: Download Now.

PS – If you’re looking for a generic program that lets you explore the contents of any window (not just AOL Modals), I highly recommend Winspector.

An Unschooling Manifesto

Mazur Leave a comment

Read this.

Quote:

If every child was unschooled — given the chance to explore and discover and learn in the real world what they love to do, what they’re uniquely good at doing, and what the world needs that they care about — then we would have a world of self-confident, creative, informed, empowered, networked entrepreneurs doing work that needs to be done, successfully. We would have armies of people collaborating to solve the problems and crises facing our world, instead of going home exhausted at the end of the day seeking escape, feeling helpless to do anything that is meaningful to thems or to the world. We would have a world of producers instead of consumers, a world of abundance instead of scarcity, a world of diversity instead of what Terry Glavin calls “a dark and gathering sameness”. We would have a world of young people choosing their lives instead of taking what they can get, what they can afford, what is offered to them. We would have a world of people who are nobody-but-themselves, and who know who they are, and how to live and make a living for themselves.

The discussion on HackerNews is excellent too.

Yeah, I hated school too. It’s not ever going to change because it’s for the masses. That’s its sole and express purpose. Why is anyone trying to redesign the system or otherwise shoehorn exceptional people into a system designed for the masses? Either drop out or shut up, in my opinion. Massive social structures don’t have time for unique butterflies. That’s the Reality of the situation with a capital R.

The optimum solution is to just get it done at an 75-90% level until you graduate HS or college and get on with your god damn life instead of fighting it for years and years and years and pulling yourself and others down in the process. Just give them the bare minimum of what they want while pursuing your own interests. It’s politics 101.

This is why many, many successful people say “I dropped out”, or “Oh, I was only a B and C student” instead of “I spent every waking moment of my life trying to rebel against the system in which I had no place in, attempting to reforming it form the inside to suit my specific needs to a tee.”

octane

Domain Pigeon Adwords

Mazur Leave a comment

Your first time is always special:

I set a monthly budget of $250 and entered about 15 phrases I’d like Domain Pigeon to pop up for.

I do realize that it’s currently the third result for this search term and that paying for advertising on this page is probably unnecessary, but what the hell, let’s see what happens.