Finding Great Domain Names with Mechanical Turk

[GiraffeNecktie]

Does anyone else find it ironic that the site selling the idea that you need a short (<6 letter) domain has a 12-letter domain name (domainpigeon.com)?

[matt1]

The key is for the domain to be memorable. If you stick two words together, especially ones that normally don't belong together, like domain and pigeon, you make it memorable. If you don't stick two words together and you want something more... web 2.0ish... then you're much better off sticking with something short than something long.

[tezza]

* Swear words & Double Entendre

Maybe a good check would be :: Does this sound like a swear word in your language?

A Swedish guy at EuroDjango con said the Finnish chosen domain http://muutu.com is a very bad swear word in Swedish.

* Checking pronouncability values are correct

Is there a sanity check step?

Can you inspect some results to check that the Mechanical Turks are not just piping in /dev/random to the results?

[nop]

I don't see how that domain sound or looks anything like a swear word in Swedish. The closest thing I can think of is mutta but it's quite a stretch and they aren't pronounced the same at least not in any English accent I can think of.

There are however plenty English words that resemble or is profanity in Swedish, we don't really take notice. Like kiss is the word for urine in Swedish, yet people don't raise eyebrows or giggle (or really notice) when they watch a romantic English movie or anything.

[matt1]

The results show you how many seconds the worker took to answer the question. You could also do some statistical analysis on the answers compared to the other people who worked on the same HIT.

[terpua]

Matt, your site is crawling :( Perhaps you're getting to many HITs :)

[matt1]

Nice pun! I've been very happy with Dreamhost, but the shared hosting does present problems when there is a lot of traffic. It's a good problem to be having...

[asciilifeform]

Creativity is hard. Let's go shopping!

[BRadmin]

Where are the majority of these workers located and does that influence their pronounceability ratings?

[matt1]

Can't say what the demographics are of the ones who completed these HITS, but of the people that complete the polls, something like 80%+ are US.

[dood]

Just clicked the register link [https://www.domainpigeon.com/users/register], got "Internal server error" with a load of info and a backtrace, which I imagine you don't want to display.

[matt1]

Thanks for the pointer.

I've been working with Dreamhost to fix the Internal Server Errors, which plague the site. Next time no shared hosting.

[tomerico]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the costs for the Amazon assignment were over 100$ for 4 people ranking pronounciability for 2 minutes each (On average). Meaning over 25$ for a 2 minutes (Lousy?) job...

[cschneid]

Not quite. There are 2360 individual tasks. Each one would take no more than 15 seconds, perhaps a bit more. Spread those across the several hundred people that are on MTurk at any given time, and you can get done in 2 minutes.

The 4 multiplier comes because as you said, each individual task is fairly unreliable for quality. He's testing each individual domain name across 4 people (not the same 4 people each time).

[mseebach]

There were 2300 2-minute assignments, at $0.04 each.

[wtdominey]

The "guest" links don't work.

[matt1]

Can you clarify which one you mean?

[anigbrowl]

Automated namespace pollution. Wonderful :-|

[pclark]

genius idea - I eagerly await Hacker News discount on accounts ;)

[matt1]

The Hacker News discount was around three months ago when it launched and was free :)