Ask HN: Please, review wordoid.com, a smart naming webapp

I looked for a domain, found one I liked, and clicked "Buy". You sent me to godaddy, who I don't use. I opened up a new tab and bought it with namecheap.

A suggestion: give me a price comparison between multiple registrars, and let me click through to any. That way you get the commission even if I don't use godaddy.

Then I noticed the little clock at the bottom ticking away. "Okay", I thought, "it's working..." but 30 seconds later it still hadn't done anything (HN effect?). I'd disable the "go" button on click, and move the clock so that it appear right next to it (instant feedback is nice). You can re-enable the "go" button if any of the parameters change.

Also, in the time its taken me to write this it still hasn't generated any results (Mac 10.5, Safari 4). Don't know if it's me or you.

One really horrible usability point: when I enter a custom pattern on the right, I can't click enter to submit the form, but instead I have to go across the screen, up, and click the small Go button. Either do it live with AJAX or just add a proper form to refresh the page.

It makes up new words that are unlikely to appear in a dictionary. It knows how to create words in several languages: English, Spanish, French and Italian at the moment. It is even able to create words in imaginary "languages", constructed by blending two or more real languages together.

I would appreciate your feedback!

I found the distinction between "order" and "buy" unclear, although the color coding helps somewhat. Perhaps "backorder" (what Go Daddy uses) would be clearer? An option to only show available domains could be useful as well. Maybe an option to specify lengths?

Seems to be very quick as well which is great. Would be cool if it would check .com .net and .org variants as I wouldn't settle on a name unless all three were available (+ .co.uk as I'm in the UK!).

On another note, while I was playing with it, the name 'effection' came up and effection.com was showing as available. I went to my preferred registrar to buy* and it's actually registered. effection.com was originally registered back in 1999! So you may need to check out your domain look up code.

*no offence to you, but I work for a registrar by day and get staff rates!

Move the search box to a more prominent position, either to the top of right column or above the domain name list. Like someone else said, move the "Go" button next to the search box so there's a smooth transition.

I'd remove the box from the main page that lets the user specify "Ends with..." or "Begins with" and instead, once they've searched, give them the option to narrow down the search results (ie only show the ends with/begins options on search result pages).

Don't show domains that people have to buy. You won't get many people to click them and it adds clutter to the results.

Put more results on the page, as it facilitates easier browsing.

In the search results, you don't need a column for the wordoid and another for the domain name. Choose one or the other. I would choose the one that ends with ".com", as it will immediately be clear to new visitors to the site. If you go the other route and just display the word, put up a small notice saying "All words are .com" or something to that effect.

You could also make the list of domains links and have the links point to GoDaddy. (Again, less clutter).

I'm not sure how much the 'Common', 'Scarse', 'Unique' labels help visitors. Consider removing it.

Add an option to filter by length, as a lot of people seek out short names.

I like the site and wish you the best of luck. I created Domain Pigeon, which is very similar to this. If you ever want to chat about ideas or monetization numbers, you can find my contact info in my profile.

The results are nice.

First (nitpick point): You've got a misspelling in the page: scarse instead of "scarce" underneath the bars that show frequency.

The UI on the right is a bit confusing and busy. I suggest removing all the text around each of the options. I might then put them at the top of the screen with the "go" button. Move the descriptive text to a little popup (more info/?/help/whatever) link next to each of the options and shove all the text in there. Something like:

Languagae (more info): []English []Spanish []French []Italian

is going to be nice and clean.

My gut feeling is that most people are not going to read the text right away and they are just going to play with it and see what happens. This is why I suggest a clean UI so they can easily play, and give them ways to discover what the options do. You don't want to put speed bumps in front of users and force them to comprehend everything out of the gate.

Another usability point: I got stuck once I typed a pattern in. I tried to delete the pattern (to go back to random mode), but the site kept using the pattern. I then realized that instead of deleting the pattern, I had to change the dropdown menu to be "Create random wordroids". This leaves the text in the pattern box but does revert to the random setting. I would re-work this with some ajax or something so that it's not so confusing.

Thanks for a useful resource.

If you change your DNS lookup method, I think you'll have fewer false positives where you list domains as being available, when they actually aren't.

For example: readia.com is not available, but the wordoid site says it is.

If you do a DNS lookup at the .com core servers, rather than your local resolver, you'll get a list of NS servers for the domain - if it's blank there, then you know the entry doesn't exist.

The current problem is occurring because your resolver library is trying to walk the DNS tree all the way to the DNS servers that are supposed to manage the domain. When those servers are down or unresponsive, wordoid is marking the domain as "available" - even when it's not.

Here's an example that I think demonstrates the problem, and a potential way around it:

dig ns readia.com. @a.gtld-servers.net. ... ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 22290

Note that it indicates no error.

For a nonexistant domain the results are different. The NXDomain means "no such domain". dig ns this-really-does-not-exist-at-all-1321.com. @a.gtld-servers.net. ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 43679

Of course, you'll need to switch between the relevant gtld-servers so that you're a good network citizen, and cache results. See "dig ns com." for a current list of GTLD servers.

Also, I'd like to echo the comments of other readers - if you place a "go" button near the input form, rather on the top left, it'll improve the user-interface significantly.

Thanks again, and I hope the above helps you.

Oskar Pearson

The pagination at the bottom of the list doesn't give any indication of how many Wordoids were generated, which would be nice. Also, as others here have pointed out, the distinction between 'order' and 'buy' is unclear.

Wordoid is incredibly useful, great job!

On a more serious note, I am trying to find a business name with a partner, and would have liked a link to a given page of results, so that I can share them.

Only gripe, mentioned by others, is that I was a little confused by (a) the custom settings on the side and enabling them properly and (b) I initially missed the pagination/next button at the bottom - probably b/c it's below-the-fold. You should make that clearer, I initially assumed I only got 10 results back. Maybe add a results count at the top of the page and clear next/previous buttons at the top as well as the bottom.

Good luck!

Safari can’t open the page “http://wordoid.com/RegistrarRedirect.aspx?registrar=godaddy&... because it’s an invalid address.

For some reason (doesn't make sense to me) it seems that Safari doesn't like the keyword 'domain' in the query parameters, because changing that to something else actually sends the request.

On second thought, I see the tiny little clock spinning ever so slowly in the corner. I suggest making that a whole lot bigger and more obvious if it routinely takes this long to generate any results.

Must be something to do with my proxy here at work: I'm not getting any results -- even after a couple minutes and tries in different browsers.

(Second the 'went off and bought via my own registrar' though :P)

One thing: The purpose of the site appears to be slightly confusing at first. Is this a site specifically for finding a domain name? Does it have a broader purpose? I don't know...

Clicking Go! seems to do nothing.

For example, I may only want VERB wordoids.

Also, you should measure how easy and unambiguous the SPELLING is.

Will be nice to see more languages thrown into the mix. Sometimes you want to get out of english to explore more options. Will definitely use it more.

Would be interesting to hear whether you use a purely linguistic approach or some statistical information about "natural" frequencies as well.

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