I have now added two new tools, which, and I say this in all modesty, I think are revolutionary in the domaining industry. To be honest, I am surprised (and frankly, relieved) that I haven’t been overrun by subscriptions, because if tools like these had been available when I was actively searching new registrations, I would have paid a lot more than $19.95 per month to get my hands on them.

The new tools are:

1. Long-Tail Tool

2. Available Domain Names Tool

These are very powerful tools. Nothing like this has previously been made available to the public, at least not that I know of. Using these tools, it is again possible to find valuable domains available for registration.

Let me explain. There are thousands of good, available domain names still out there in the .com namespace. It is not true that recent hand regs don’t have a market. There are thousands of good generic 2- and 3-word dotcom domain names out there still waiting to be registered. Sure, about 99.9% of really good generics have been registered. That still leaves the 0.1%, which in this case means thousands of names. I have two offers waiting right now for a couple of very recent hand regs of mine, both offers are close to $500. I’m not going to accept them, though.

New markets emerge, new products are launched, new brandable names are needed, and the market value of generic domain names keeps going up. Those that were worth the reg fee 5 years ago are now worth hundreds if not thousands. 3-word generic domains are gaining popularity and value. There is nothing like a perfectly descriptive domain name to boost a business. Look at Bill’s site, AvailableDomainNames.com - that’s a great 3-worder if there ever was one. It’s long, but it doesn’t matter - it’s easy to remember, because it describes the service perfectly.

I don’t like to see people registering made-up domain names, silly word combinations with no meaning. I believe in the power of generic domain names. I just sold a two-word generic, OfficePartitions.com, for $7.5k on SEDO. Almost every time I get a nice offer for a domain name of mine, the name in question is a true generic keyword domain.

That’s why I developed two tools for my own use, and these tools I’ve now made part of Estibot Pro. Let me explain the workings of the tools.

1. The Available Domain Names Tool

This one is simple. Just enter your keyword and the tool will churn out domain names that have search popularity, in other words, generic keyword domain names. It will show both registered and available ones, because by seeing the registered ones, you start getting an idea of what kind of domains are desirable. The tool will show in green color the available ones. The tool selects potentially good domain names by analyzing Overture, Wordtracker, PPC Ad profile, Max Advertiser bid, and so on. The rest is up to you.

The tool prints out the domain name, some fundamental stats, the keywords, and registration options. Click on the keyword to perform what I think is the first and most important step of domain name research: Check the Google Adtest Search. This will, at a glance, tell you how popular the term is (the number of Google results) and also how popular the term is with advertisers (the number and type of PPC Ads appearing, and the quality of the advertisers). At the bottom of the results output you have two text boxes, the first has the available domain names in text format, and the second one has the corresponding search terms. Use these to perform additional research before you register, for instance, I always run the list of names through the Fast Bulk appraisal tool to get a quick idea of relative value.

PS. For best results, I recommend narrowing down your searches: Instead of searching for “cars”, search for “used cars”, “sports cars”, “car sales”, or go through the alphabet: search for “car a”, “car b”, and so on.

2. The Long Tail of Search Tool

In my humble opinion this is the hottest domaining tool out there today. It’s my personal favorite, and it really empowers the individual domainer to find good domain names, and to learn about the finer aspects of search popularity.

For this tool, you enter the keyword or search term you wish to research, and also enter the number of long-tail results to mine, up to 10,000.

The script will producekeyword data for your given search term and up to 10,000 related search terms virtually in an instant.

This is a wonderful tool for finding available domain names. The tool will show in bold text the domain names that it thinks may have special potential. It will also highlight in red some significant numbers related to the domain name.

When you see an interesting domain name, just click on the “Check” link on the left. The tool will check and report whether that domain name is available or not. Then, just click on the domain name to add it to your “notes” text box on the top. Once you’re finished with the page, you can copy-paste the domain names from the text box to your personal files, or other tools such as the Fast Bulk Appraisal tool for further research. Or just straight to your favorite Bulk Registration tool - you could always taste the domains for traffic for the duration of the grace period. Click on the keywords again to check the Google Adtest page. Study the numbers to get a feel of the potential value of the domain name in question.

This tool is so good even I find it hard to go to sleep once I start using it. It’s fascinating to find new domain names with PPC Ad bids up to $30, and most of all, this tool is great for learning about great keyword niches - every time I use it I discover niches I didn’t know existed, and more often than not, I find a domain or two worth registering in those niches.

Enjoy!

Behold, the appraisal formula that always gives accurate results:

DNV = DPB * DPS * MB * MS * AMV

In other words,

Domain Name Value = Deepness of Pocket of Buyer * Deepness of Pocket of Seller * Motivation of Buyer * Motivation of Seller * Approximate Market Value

A new tool is available for use - the Domain List Scanner. The scanner enables you to scan large numbers of domains for potentially valuable ones. For instance, you could paste expired domains lists and have Estibot detect and print out a list of those domains that might have some value. Check it out at: http://estibot.com/members/scanner.php

MSN Live API has been giving erroneous results lately. I have contacted them in order to resolve this issue. Domains entered in all lowercase may not be properly parsed by Estibot, and MSN has been erroneously giving millions of search results for terms such as “allvoipcalls”, “headsofstate”, “wewillrockyou” and so on. This has resulted in overestimations of value. As a temporary solution, I have coded a filter to try to catch these errors and divide the results by 1,000 to avoid these overestimations. MSN seems to give proper results for properly parsed keywords, so you can avoid this issue by always designating the keywords by KeywordCapitalization (works in single and bulk tools) or separating the keywords with a space (works only in single tool). Also, Estibot’s own search database will often give extensive data if the keywords are parsed properly. In summary, in the single appraisal tool, please enter domains in any of the following formats: all voip calls.com heads of state.com AllVoipCalls.com HeadsOfState.com In the bulk tool, please enter: AllVoipCalls.com HeadsOfState.com Please note that MSN API has also been very slow lately and is causing delays in the appraisals. Needless to say, I am looking hard at dropping MSN API from Estibot and trying to find an alternative solution that would serve you better.

A warm welcome to my blog, in which I hope to answer all your questions about Estibot, the subscription service, announce new tools and future plans, and share my humble views on domaining. In this first entry, let me tell you a bit about the history of Estibot, and the technology behind it. In the next entry, I will shed some light on my decision to go subscription-based, and discuss the new Estibot Pro tools, and tell you a bit of my plans for the future. 

 I first started toying with the idea of automated appraisals around Christmas time 2006. The reason for my interest was that I was fairly new to domaining, and wasn’t sure how to tell which domains had value and which did not. I had hand regged quite a number of domains (as we all seem to do when we first start out), most of which turned out to be what are referred to in the business as crap domain names. Hand regging a bunch of crap names seems to be the baptism of fire we all have to go through before we decide to try and learn a thing or two about domaining. I figured there must exist some general rules for determining domain value. I set out to discover those rules, and somewhere in the process I started thinking, if indeed there are rules, then it should be possible to devise a computer program that would employ those rules to come up with a value estimation. After all, IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov in Chess, surely domain valuation should be simpler than that. 

I searched the Net for domain appraisals, and found some sites that would offer automated appraisals for free. The most popular such sites then were Leapfish and Nameboy. I tested them with a largish number of domain names but wasn’t satisfied with the results they produced. I liked what they’d done, but their results just didn’t compare to known sale prices very well. 

I decided to attempt to make such a program for my own use, to help me make informed decisions about buying and selling domain names. Armed with a knowledge of programming in Basic (from owning a Sinclair Spectrum in the 80’s) and some idea of Pascal (yes, there used to be a programming language by that name), I set out to embrace the task. Pretty soon I found out that my programming skills, such as they were, were horribly outdated and I had to look at other options. I dediced to go mathematical, which would require no programming, just mathematical analysis done by a spreadsheet program. I fired up my Excel and started experimenting. 

I gathered information about the various factors that were generally considered important for domain value, and soon discovered that what makes or breaks a domain name is the quality of the search terms, or keywords, within the domain. I learned about search popularity, term frequency, and also discovered other parameters that were considered important, such as the TLD, length, hyphens, digits and so on. I started gathering that data for a number of domains, and tried to figure out a mathematical method for determining domain value based on those factors. After a few weeks of experimenting I realized I was not getting anywhere. No matter how I tried, the model would spit out seemingly random values, certainly not much better than what I’d seen Nameboy or Leapfish do.

 Thanks to my then girlfriend and now mother of my 4-month-old son (one thing leads to another as they say…), I decided to take another approach. She suggested I try to employ scientific principles in the analysis. I have a fairly extensive training in the natural sciences, with two doctorate degrees, one of them being a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. So I decided to apply what I had been trained to do: find order in apparent chaos - correlations, associations, and ultimately, hopefully, rules and laws that would explain the workings of the domain market. Using the very same scientific principles as I’ve used in my Neuroscience research, I gathered keyword and other data for thousands of domains, and finally after a few weeks I found a way to produce a reasonably good correlation between the characteristics of a domain name and its market value. For the statistically inclined, I reached a p<0.05 for positive correlation between what my model spat out, and the known sale price of domains - in large samples. 

I spent another 3 months honing the algorithm, and in the process made some surprising findings, for instance that the length of a domain name, contrary to popular belief, does not correlate with domain value except in the extremes of the spectrum. I analyzed each factor separately, and all combinations of known factors, and settled on, originally about 8 parameters that could be used for determining value. Since then, the algorithm has swollen and more factors have come into play, but in the end, I was fairly happy with my algorithm as a rough indicator of potential value. It still had severe shortcomings, and would be easily fooled by abnormalities in the search popularity data. I was using Overture data, and as we know, Overture has some serious disadvantages, resulting in overestimations of value for a large number of domain names. 

What I had in my hands was a single mathematical formula for domain valuation. It looked something like this: 

$VALUE=((((c*sqrt(h*i)+E*j+f*k)*SIGN(e-c*l)+ABS((c*m+e*n+f*o)*SIGN(a-b*q)))/2)+r/(g^(g+(g-2)))+(-SIGN(e-c*s)*f*t)+f*u+(-SIGN(e-a*v)*g*w)+h*x+(-SIGN(c-a*y)*e*z)+d*a+c/z)*x/SQRT(g)+100/h 

Just one look at that formula and I knew I was at the end of the road for improving it. I found it hard to edit, as I wasn’t quite sure what was what anymore. As the mathematically inclined will see instantly, I’m no mathematician and decided to pursue other ways to improve the valuation algorithm. 

I needed to learn programming again. 

Since I was going to have to learn programming, the idea came to me, why not learn a language that I could use for other purposes as well, such as making websites. The obvious choice, then, was PHP. After a crash course in PHP programming, I found that I was able to hone the algorithm programmatically, and make the mathematical bit a lot neater. Finally I arrived at an algo that I thought was as good as I could reasonably expect to achieve. It worked for me; even with its limitations, it helped me make sense of domain values. 

By that time I had been hanging out at the NamePros.com domaining forum, and had made many new friends in the world of domaining. I wanted to share with them my creation, such as it was, and decided the best way to do it was to publish it online. With the help of Bill from NameClerk.com and of AvailableDomainNames.com fame, I found the perfect domain name for it, Estimation Bot -> Estibot.com, and finally I had a bunch of friendly NamePros members to alpha test it privately, and, encouraged by their positive feedback, Estibot.com went live in June of 2007.

The original website development was done by eTechSupport.net for about $800. Since then I have learned enough PHP to have redone everything by myself. Only the center column colors are what’s left of the original website. The new look is in part thanks to another NamePros member, Bannen, who designed the new logo (asking for absolutely nothing in return) and also has designed a whole website layout for me, which I haven’t had a chance to implement yet. If you haven’t seen Bannen’s Ice Photography yet, you’re missing on some of the more beautiful things in life - go check it out now!

So you see, Estibot was never intended to become a website, or otherwise public for that matter - I made it for my own use, but looking back, releasing it was the right thing to do. The reception was cautiously positive, but, predictably, it got mixed reviews in the domaining peers. Some loved it, some absolutely hated it. The consensus, however, seemed to be that it was the best auto-appraisal system to date, for what that was worth. Knowing well the limitations of automatic appraisals - or human appraisals for that matter - it was good enough for me, and I decided to keep at it, keep improving it. 

The last changes to the algorithm were done around Christmas time 2007, a full year after the initiation of the project. I had spend countless hours on this thing, I decided it was time to focus on developing the website more and leave the algorithm at that for now, because it had come to the point in complexity where even a small change could have unpredictable results. That is not to say that I won’t try to improve it in the future - I’m just taking a holiday from the mathematical side of it, if you will. 

To my utter amazement, the website got pretty popular, and today it has an Alexa rank of about 18,000, with about 750,000 hits per month. In order to keep it functional, I had to get a dedicated server for it, and added Adsense and affiliate links in order to cover the server costs. Originally I used screen scraping of Overture, Google and other services to get the keyword data, but, having educated myself of good Webmaster practices, opted out of that and started using API access to various services to retrieve the data.

Website growth is a two-edged sword - as the popularity grew, I was starting to exceed the limits my API access quotas, Google even banned the site at some point, and I had to constantly keep tweaking things to keep up. I have since then added paid API contracts to retrieve some of the data. Each “free” appraisal actually costs me money, which is one of the reasons I decided to go premium, but more on that later. 

Some of the more significant later improvements include the website traffic estimation, which I developed - it uses, among other things, paid data retrieval from Alexa. It enabled me to add the “value considering traffic” feature, which I think works reasonably well, although you can’t really valuate a website based on traffic alone. But it’s a nice addition, and the traffic estimation seems to do a fairly good job at estimating external website traffic at ballpark level. 

But Estibot would only be a shadow of what it is now if it weren’t for the support of two very generous members of the NamePros community. The intervention of these men really made all the difference. Call it serendipity if you will, but these two events turned a whole new page in the development of Estibot. First, Justin of NameBio.com (you may know him as Spade from NamePros) offered to give me access to his veritable database of domain sales known as NameBio.com. I confessed to him that I had extracted most of my original data for the analysis from his site, and he offered the whole database for my use, again asking for nothing in return. Estibot is now able to compare entered domains to Justin’s database in realtime, resulting in even better appraisals, and also there is now a “related sales” feature which helps users to instantly see prices retrieved by related domain names. Justin and I are talking about deepening the integration now that the subscription service has been started up.

Another huge turn of events was the offer from another NamePros member, Michael Goldman, to provide me with access to his gigantic database of archived search data, enabling me to offer realtime search popularity data and bulk tools that can retrieve data very fast. I cannot stress how important this was, and I am to this day extremely grateful to this fellow domainer. All Michael asked for in return for this invaluable resource was that I make him a few simple bulk tools to enable him to run bulk estimations and keyword data retrieval. Needless to say, this was a major show of generosity and support for my project. Michael posts interesting domain news at his website, Domain Magnate. 

So you see, Estibot is actually the product of many people - fellow domainers who have supported me, given me money in the form of donations, access to their data, volunteered to test my tools, and publicly supported me on their website, driving more traffic to Estibot. It’s a great community, NamePros, people are ready to help and bend backwards to assist a fellow domainer in his endeavours to make something of value. I hope I can pay these favors forward, as I certainly can’t pay many of them back. 

I hope you enjoyed reading about the history of Estibot, and my take-home message to all is this: network with people, be polite, help each other out and good things will come your way. 

As I said before, success in website development is a two-edged sword. Since Estibot became popular, it has been operating at a loss that even the ads and the user donations could not turn around. Domainers don’t click on ads, donations are few and far between and affiliate marketing ain’t what it used to be. I have a mortgage to pay, family to feed, and I could not justify running Estibot anymore, considering the efforts it demanded from me, time away from my family in the evenings (I have a day job as well, you know), and having to pay server and API access costs out of my own pocket. I had to make a choice: take Estibot down altogether, or make parts of it subscription-based. I decided to try the latter, hoping that it would enable me to keep developing this service, and hopefully if I get enough subscribers, justifying the continuation of the service, I can go back to improving the free tools as well, which is what I originally intended to do. More about the subscription based service in my next entry. Until then, keep on domainin’