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Sedo is crap...

Discussion in 'General Board' started by pugdomains, Mar 7, 2016.

  1. pugdomains United Kingdom

    pugdomains Active Member

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    I've been buying domains recently, .com domains, for development.

    Their algorithm / search results are absolutely terrible.

    It is literally impossible to find decent domains among the rubbish. And they do this stupid thing where you type in a word and rather than present you with their best two word combos or brandables they will present you with an endless list of rubbish one word alt domains.

    Anybody with decent two work keyword domains seem to be missing out Sedo entirely, I've resorted to using the Google keyword tool and then manually typing into the browser to see where domains are parked.

    If anybody has found Sedo less active as a seller then try and use it as a buyer these days! I used to buy on Sedo back in 2011(ish) and it was FAR more user friendly.

    Just a rant, please don't flood my inbox with sales pitches, I know what I'm looking for!
     
  2. Domain Forum

    Acorn Domains Elite Member

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    IWA Meetup
     
  3. Edwin

    Edwin Well-Known Member

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    I agree that it's a mess, but if you take a bit of time to set the "Advanced Search" and other parameters you can improve the situation a little.

    For example, you can narrow the search to ".com" or ".co.uk" only by means of the "Extensions" pull-down, and exclude any IDN domains, domains with hyphens or domains with numbers in them inside Advanced Search. If you untick "include keyword variations" the search should be restricted to domains with your actual search term in them.

    There is also an Advanced Search option for "number of words" but I'm not convinced it works particularly well...
     
  4. omcgb United Kingdom

    omcgb Well-Known Member

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    The "quality" results are replicated in the feeds they provide too. We would like to include their results in one of our new sites but they are rubbish and can't be filtered, not even by .uk

    Here's a sample of the top 20 results for the keyword 'FLORIDA'

    floridanos.com, floridae.com, floridaq.com, floridah.com, floridat.com
    floridavc.com, floridapm.com, floridano.com, floridade.com, floridahe.com
    floridadb.com, florida21.com, floridany.com, floridava.com, floridafd.com
    floridamu.com, floridago.com, floridaac.com, floridadr.com, floridadv.com

    We have contacted them by email and phone about 10 times to ask if there's a way of filtering by TLD, popularity, latest etc. but no-one has ever got back to us.

    I could give you a list of problems with their site and procedures as long as my arm and yours.

    Matt
     
  5. Skinner

    Skinner Well-Known Member

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    Its an XML feed isn't it ? Can't you filter it ?

    When I download the recently sold, I filter that for .UK only ?

    I've never used the other feeds so not sure.
     
  6. omcgb United Kingdom

    omcgb Well-Known Member

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    As far as I know it only shows a limited amount and there is now way of paging through the results, so the good quality names aren't even included.

    Also, they have over 13 million domains listed so there are probably tens of thousands available for some keywords so it would be impossible to extract them all and filter out after.
     
  7. Edwin

    Edwin Well-Known Member

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    It's a real pain, but can't you start with the zone file (which is available for .com) and do the search on that, then ship the subset of the zone file that contains that keyphrase across to a different subroutine and check if each of those results is listed on Sedo?

    That would let you code anything you like to improve the results e.g. cross-match with a word splitter, dictionary files etc. It would probably have to be batch processed rather than in real time, but it might give you what you want.

    Plus, if it was "good enough" it could be a public-facing tool, and you could code every one of the results with a 5% Sedo partner link...
     
  8. bluerock United Kingdom

    bluerock Well-Known Member

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    Do Sedo not post on Acorn anymore?
     
  9. omcgb United Kingdom

    omcgb Well-Known Member

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    There are ways of achieving what we need using data from multiple sources and a lot of coding, but we decided not to spend the time due to the complete lack of interest from Sedo.

    It's very surprising that a company with the experience of Sedo doesn't have a fully functioning API available for their affiliates.
     
  10. Edwin

    Edwin Well-Known Member

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    It still sounds like an opportunity - either to build a valuable tool that could drive affiliate commissions from sales, or to build something that could then be sold back to Sedo to improve their own platform.

    (But of course the effort might be too much for the potential gain)
     
  11. omcgb United Kingdom

    omcgb Well-Known Member

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    Agreed, it may be an opportunity for someone but not for us.
     
  12. ian

    ian Well-Known Member

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    Still reckon there is significant scope for a UK market domain website to be built to compete with Sedo. Domainlore does a great job of offering an auction site, but significant development and funding would be required to bring it to the attention of those other than investors/domainers - which I guess was never its purpose. Sedo is a joke, can't believe anyone still uses it!
     
  13. omcgb United Kingdom

    omcgb Well-Known Member

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    I totally agree Ian
     
  14. daxio France

    daxio Active Member

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    its quite easy to get live domain lists from Verisign for particular keywords , and simple to the look up NS records to see where hosted , but not for commercial use / profit / bulk / automated etc.

    FLORIDAFERRETS.COM
    FLORIDAFERRIES.COM
    FLORIDAFERRIESTOCUBA.COM
    FLORIDAFERRY.COM
    FLORIDAFERRYCUBA.COM
    FLORIDAFERRYINT.COM
    FLORIDAFERRYINT.NET
    FLORIDAFERRYS.COM
    FLORIDAFERRYSERVICE.COM
    FLORIDAFERRYSERVICES.COM
    FLORIDAFERRYTOCUBA.COM

    interestingly floridaferret.com seems to be available