GoDaddy & the Quest to Find Out Why Can't I Have Ninja.Com?!
A URL by any other name would sound as sound as sweet. Shakespeare wrote that, right?
When setting up your website, what’s in a name, really? Is it long? Short? Personally meaningful? Or is it just a random collection of words, words, words (or characters - lookin’ at you there, xkcd)? And after you figure out the name, then comes the even harder part...do you want to be a .com or a .co (hey, take it from us, those m’s can be expensive), a .org, .net. or a .banana?
If you are like most people, your first step to domain name ownership could be a quick visit to GoDaddy - after all it’s the web’s largest URL registry. And wouldn’t you know, their search function, recommendation engine, and even some other fun stuff are all powered by Elasticsearch. Wait a tick, how do I know all of this? Yes, they did publish an awesome blog about it, but really it’s because we had the pleasure of sitting down with Chris Ambler, Principal Software Development Engineer at GoDaddy, at Elastic{ON}15 to get the story, face to face.
He walked us through the star-crossed journey of a URL-seeker. It can an arduous journey from concept (some people try keywords while others are just clicking around for divine inspiration) to dead ends (WHAT?!? WHY CAN’T I HAVE NINJA.COM) to resolution (hey look, that recommendation is perfect, why didn’t I think of that?). But as you’ll see, the final act of getting that perfect URL is well worth the complete works that come before it.
And in the name of brevity - it is the soul of wit after all - if you get nothing else from this video or blog, understand these two points:
- You should never rewrite Shakespeare, he did it right the first time
- GoDaddy's domain search and recommendation engine is powered by Elasticsearch
It's not that you can't have ninja.com, it's just that you actually wanted something better and GoDaddy already knew it.