Verisign gets IDN suggestion patent

Patent helps domain searchers find translations and transliterations.

Gray background with the word "patents" on it, in between two horizontal bars

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted patent number 10,686,750 (pdf) to Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) for Alternate character set domain name suggestion and registration using translation and transliteration.

The patent describes a way for searchers to enter a word and see both translations and transliterations of the word, and check their domain registration status.

This is applicable to internationalized domain names (IDN). An IDN is a domain name that includes at least one non-ASCII character. Many top level domain names allow people to register domain names in languages with non-ASCII character sets, such as Arabic, Japanese and Russian. These domains can be registered in .com, and Verisign now offers some transliterations of .com to the right of the dot. (A transliteration of .com is essentially something that makes the same sound as ‘com’ in the language.)

Verisign applied for the patent in 2017.

Also on the wire