Incorporating prices of
sold domain names into search-engine algorithms improves the quality
of search-engine results. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, no
search engine has yet taken advantage of price information.
Search engines use various
factors to determine the rank of a Website within a search result.
For example, Google uses the number of sites that link to another
Website as one of the factors. According to this method, the more
people who link to Website A, the more important Website A is,
and thus the higher its ranking for a specific keyword. However,
without a value metric, Google is not able to determine whether
2 links are significantly better than 5, or whether 50 are significantly
better than 100.
Sale prices of domain names
can provide a measure of value. Using discriminant-tree techniques
to analyze our domain-name database, we find significant clusters
of link-ins.
Search engines can combine
domain-name-value information with their ranking factors to improve
the quality of results. The increased quality is a result of
