Question

I have been tasked with coming up with a routine that will suggest alternative domain names to register if the customers original requested domain name is already registered.

The first step I think would be to split the requested domain back in to bits so that I could work out alternatives to try.

eg. mybigredtruck.com would be broken up in to “my”, “big”, “red” & “truck”

Then I would need some way of working out alternatives for these.

Does anybody know of any methods, components / web services that could do any of this functions. Any ideas will be greatfully accepted.

Answer 1

Here is a good place to start with a matching algorithm:

• Obtain a dictionary of words

• Remove nonalphabetic characters from
  the input string

• Remove the TLD extension from the
  input string

• Assuming that the input text is spelt
  correctly, at to match it with a
  dictionary entry; if it does not
  match (in the case of undelimited
  concatenated words) then try one less
  character in a loop until it matches.
  Store the match but look for all
  other matches. Do the same for the
  remainder of the string.

The correct match would be the one where all substrings of the full input string is matched, e.g., wwww.soilofgarden.com = ‘soil of garden’ and not ‘so?? of garden’