Startup Uses Semantics to Pick Domain Names

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Originally published at Internet.com

The group of 20-something individuals behind the domain monetization company EVO Landing.com moves at a fast pace. Since it launched in October, the company has secured venture funding from Monster Venture Partners and released three versions of its technology, the most recent one drawing on the power of proprietary semantics-based analytics. But the company sees increasing value for its own venture as the standards-driven semantic web grows.

EVO Landing, which announced its public launch last month, is competing against the likes of parking sites such as Go Daddy.com, where users can register their site name but, in the absence of any more significant content, populate the page primarily with keyword-based ad links. EVO Landing seeks to do better for the owners of Internet domain names, determining what type of site a particular domain name should be in order to best monetize it and suit it to user expectations. For example, one site may better lend itself to news content, or videos, or job-related postings, and EVO Landing has partnerships with providers such as Shopping.com, Epinions, Software.com, Podcast.com, and others to provide modular content to plug into a site.

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The semantic side comes in with domain analysis, explains chief architect Daniel Rust. People come to us with a large portfolio of domains, and we can identify which are the quality names from our semantic analysis, those we know will do well on our system.

The domain market is big business, according to Geoffrey Allen Bautista Nuval, CEO and co-founder - and at nearly 26 years old, the grandpa of the outfit. Private investors may hold portfolios from 100 to hundreds of thousands of domain names, often just parking them and collecting on the text ad links theyre hosting from the users who are bound to drop by, drawn in by the URL.

But those same visitors arent likely to come back, once they realize the site has little to recommend it. Because EVO Landing enables sites to be populated with fresh and relevant content, it opens the door to return traffic.

People actually return to the site and by incorporating additional modules, such as forums and user-generated content, we make them even more unique and useful for the users, he says. And because it is a real site, search engines actually pull up our sites when people search.

With the latest version of its platform, the company says that it is has auutomated the manual work of going through a domain list and identifying categories for a particular domain name to determine what type of web site should be built.

We have our own categorization tool that throws our domains into various buckets, says Rust. And he thinks that as the standards-based Semantic Web becomes a reality, EVO Landings job can get easier, too. The way our system is now is that it is semantically analyzing the domains, but within the system we have a content aggregation server to get content that is relevant to a site, he says.

Using the keywords associated with the domains, related content is pulled from around the web into the domains using the aggregator as the source. But s other sources evolve into trading APIs and sharing data across the web, he says, EVO Landing can make use of that open approach to things to easily plug semantically-relevant content into its customers sites.

Its key to keep up the quality of EVO Landing-powered web sites, says Nuval. EVO Landing currently accepts only 8 to 9% of the domains submitted to it so far. It currently has 10,000 sites with no two of them alike, the company says. Hes also confident that the approach EVO Landing is taking is the future for domain monetization sites, noting that EVO Landing was being called an industry disrupter at the recent DomainFest conference.