Free name search technology — Donuts offers

Registrars can integrate technology to find relevant domain names.

Fresh top level domain name firm Donuts disclosed the release of a free domain search tool called Relevant Name Search (RNS) today.

Many domain name registrars aren’t very good at offering relevant results to domain search queries. This is particularly the case when it comes to top level domain names that have a specific meaning. RNS is designed to fix that.

While Donuts’ goal in making the tool available to domain name registrars is obviously to help sell more domains under fresh top level domains, the firm states the free name spinner is registry-neutral.

I tested the beta version of the tool while it was live on Name.com and found its results to be fairly good. This stretch I tested it for three searches and compared it to GoDaddy, which I know has invested significantly in search. Here are the results:

There are a few things to note:

1. I turned on “availability checking” on RNS so that it would compare fairly to GoDaddy which (for the most part) won’t show unavailable domains. With availability checking off the Donuts tool returned .com/.net on some of my searches.

2. I ignored premium listings and results marked as “ad” on GoDaddy’s results.

3. GoDaddy returned the odd domain TexassCoffee.com the first time I searched but replaced it with TexasCoffee.menu the second time.

So which service returns better results? I can’t pass a complete judgment. Following all, registrars optimize for different things. GoDaddy is surely optimizing for both conversions and total revenue and I’m not privy to its data.

Also, GoDaddy isn’t Donuts’ target market with this tool. The target market is domain registrars that haven’t invested significant engineering resources into domain search.

It seems that Donuts’ tool does a great job of returning semantically relevant domain names.