Reglikedomain industry desk

Two patents for domain appraisal — GoDaddy gets

Paul Nicks’ inventions related to name spinning and appraisals get patent protection.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office today issued two patents to GoDaddy related to name spinning and appraisal.

U.S. Patent number 8,447,701 is titled “Appraising domain names using comparative data” and 8,447,702 (pdf) is “Domain appraisal algorithm”.

The patents have lots of overlapping material. They cover name spinning to create permutations of domain names as well as multiple aspects of automatically generating a domain name appraisal.

Here’s a summary of some of the aspects of domain valuation that the patent describes:

The appraisal may be accomplished by breaking the valuation of the domain into five logical groupings, possibly counting evaluation of “5 P’s” related to the domain name. Evaluation of “precision” may include the number of distinct keywords found, the length of the name and the number of keywords found in the dictionary. Evaluation of “popularity” may include various search engine search result metrics and tracking of words searched per month. Evaluation of “presence” may include the age of the domain, and the rank of the web site as stated by web ranking services or software. Evaluation of “pattern” may include the number of premium characters, the part of speech (such as noun, plural noun, verb, adjective, etc., possibly considering if the domain is a one word domain), the relationship of vowels and consonants etc. (possibly considering if the domain is a 4-5 character word). Evaluation of Pay-Per-Click, or PPC, may include the maximum number of pay-per-click bids from various advertising tracking services or software, and the number of ads returned within search engine searches. A dynamic multiplier based on registration statistics for each of a number of top level domains (TLDs) may then be applied to the domain evaluation. This multiplier may be used to give a very accurate measure of domain scarcity to let a user or evaluator know how rare a domain name is.

Paul Nicks, Director of Product Development GoDaddy.com’s Aftermarket, is listed as inventor on both patents.

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