http://domainnamewire.com/2007/09/17/so-long-overture-scores/
Ahhh the ‘goto tool’… Old timers in the domain industry still ask "What’s the goto" when trying to determine the popularity of a given search-phrase with spaces between the words (apart), with spaces removed (together) and as a complete domain name (with extension). What these folks are asking is "How many times has this term been searched over the past month across the goto, (later called Overture and currently called Yahoo) paid search network? The answer to that question will determine whether a given phrase will garner organic, generic-intent type-in traffic when registered as a domain name.
I’ll never forget the day when Garry Chernoff showed me this tool for the first time. My eyes lit up with wonderment at this window into the hearts, minds and souls of the Internet browsing public. Want to know what the most popular types of pie are? Just enter the word "pie" and see how many people search for apple, blueberry, cherry etc.. "American Pie" and "Pie Theory" always seemed to be the most popular pies.. but after a while you learned why that was..
It stood to reason that if some portion of the browsing public was so determined to find pictures of dolphins that they simply typed dolphinpictures.com into the search box at yahoo (recording one search in the suggestion tool) that those same people (and others) would type the domain-name in their browser address bar looking for the non-existent website that this powerful name describes.
I acquired the name when it dropped and was surprised to see 25 visits a day.. The people still come back, half a decade later.
That goto suggestion tool faithfully turned back billions of queries over the years and helped guide countless novice domain investors as they mined for untapped traffic veins. Many of those folks became "Fabulous"ly successful and created vast fortunes in spite of being late to the domain game. As word about this open software tool made rounds on the Internet it became much slower as parties ran monster lists against it, trying to harvest data. Surprisingly, Yahoo kept the tool open and unrestricted even after acquiring Overture.
Those days now appear to be "over" .. Several folks have reported the demise of the tool’s monthly update and results appear skewed since last week. Thanks for the memories goto tool. We’ll always have Wordtracker but you will be missed by many.
Overture for free: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
Have Fun!
Another view into the FREE market decision-making on name selection is the -DLD.com extensions. Below is a 1998 survey. One could view it as one-domain-one-vote, sort of like a democracy, unlike the current communist/socialist/Cuba-like control of the name-space.
If anyone is following the 2007 name-space expansion discussions, it should be clear that Frank’s advice to stick with .COM is now more important than ever. Even .NET will have to be RE-Launched to route around the current .NET regime. One question is wheather .COM people really want to RE-LAUNCH .COM with a -COM.com arrangement. Note below that people actually selected -COM.com names in 1998. [That was not their top choice.]
.INC has been one of the top Free Market Choices for years. That brings up some other questions, one of which is…How will owners (like Frank) feel about names like PersonalLoans.com moving to the Personal-Loans-INC.com format ? The -INC.com is collapsed by the new software into .INC.
While we are here in the Caymans, it would also be good to find out how people feel about putting the redundant .COM cluster in Canada (or the Caribbean) ? The THIRD .COM Cluster of course ends up in people’s edge devices (routers), burned in their collective flash memories, making it much harder for the Domain Sharks to eat their names.
10514 INC
9264 ONLINE
7288 NET
6472 USA
4481 GROUP
4101 WEB
3891 TECH
3077 UK
2762 DESIGN
2570 SYSTEMS
2542 IT
2415 US
2378 SOLUTIONS
2322 LINE
2209 LAW
2171 CONSULTING
2161 INFO
2033 SERVICES
2027 WORLD
1966 SOFTWARE
1940 INTERNATIONAL
1932 INTL
1880 CORP
1874 CO
1803 SHOP
1795 FRANCE
1720 HOMES
1671 S
1638 ART
1603 TV
1587 TRAVEL
1555 MAIL
1534 EUROPE
1529 DIRECT
1491 MEDIA
1487 MALL
1431 E
1419 LTD
1417 ASSOCIATES
1411 1
1361 SERVICE
1342 2000
1339 Z
1301 NETWORK
1289 NEWS
1269 INT
1232 SA
1218 ENTERPRISES
1217 CENTER
1216 CLUB
1202 MARKETING
1177 REALTY
1161 MUSIC
1149 STORE
1144 INSURANCE
1108 I
1101 COM
1083 PRODUCTS
1070 REALESTATE
Wow. This is disheartening. I used this for years, many moons ago in the late 90′s. I would suspect some whipper snapper software coding genius will have a similar version out soon though. Heck, I may even be willing to pay a few bucks for the data…..
By the way, when taking a narrow-view (or narrow-vew) and looking at the world as only 3-letter extensions, the top extensions are shown below. One of the nice things about the new DNS software is that it can key on real-world hard facts, based in the .COM space.
10514 INC
7288 NET
6472 USA
4101 WEB
2209 LAW
1638 ART
1419 LTD
1269 INT
When you combine the above with their 4-letter plays USA*.com or *USA.com, then you start to get a feel for how serious .com owners are about an extension. The software can detect that and flag an extension as needing to be cloned and placed into dedicated TLD clusters.
One name and one vote and no nutty professors or QUANGO travel junkies attempting to play .NET Nanny.
I just subscribed to Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery but it’s just not the same..
Dear Frank:
I have a friend at Yahoo who says Overture will be back. I’ll keep you posted.
All the best,
Steve Smith
InsideDomaining.com
Hi Frank
Just wanted to let you know that the Overture tool is back up online. However, it still only shows results from January.
Regards
Flipper! How we’ve missed thee!
I really miss the Overture tool, hopefully something just like it will return, even if it has a monthly fee.
Garry Chernoff, will his story ever be told in a magazine or book? I remember friends in the Okanagan telling me about this hospital guy who was making big money with domains back around 2000, turns out it was Garry. But I’d love to hear how he got started and his early days of domaining – could you convince him to post it on your blog?
Yahoo OVT tool is back and it seems to be pretty fast (probably because most people stopped checking and it’s not being hammered with queries)
Here’s to hope it will stay operational for many many years…
As far as I can remember, Goto was one of the earliest pay per click search engine, even before Google.
The Goto tool was just something for keyword buyers to manage their PPC campaigns and it has been fully exploited by visionary domainers to acquire vast fortunes.
I salute the visionaries and goodbye, Goto.com!
Al.
OVT is back online my friend, it’s spitting out some old results again but there’s no RIP yet ,o)
***FS*** Helleluja .. hope that’s spelled correctly
Back but still only Jan 2007 results.
Yahoo is regrouping… in July Jerry Yang said “there are no sacred cows”… the ovt data represents a decent (and presently missed) revenue opportunity… the tool will be back as a paid service. IMHO.