As brandable boutiques became more popular and flooded with listings, many have questioned the search protocols. Many a debate on Namepros around which tags were used on BrandBucket and if certain people got special treatment.
Squadhelp rolled out what they call Hyper Personalized Search Listings
Beginning in Jan 2021, we have extended the AI and Personalization capabilities to our search and Marketplace listings page as well. And the initial results are extremely promising!
We realized that each buyer’s persona is different and it makes more sense to rank the products based upon their specific preferences.
For example, if we can establish with a high degree of certainty that a particular buyer is interested in Food related brand names, it makes sense to boost the rankings of food related names even when they are browsing the main Marketplace listings page.
Similarly, if they search for keywords such as “Green”, we can prioritize Food related domains in the search results even though the keyword they searched could have otherwise matched several non food related industries such as Green Energy.
As buyers interact with various sections of our Platform, we continue to build an AI based Persona that tells us more about their preferences. Here’s an example of a buyer who browsed some food related sections of our platform:
You can read the full results on Squadhelp.com
The discussions about ‘insiders’ and supposedly biased search results have been happening for years now. And several solutions have been tried. I find interesting what Brandpa did: they provide with an automated value for the domain, let the domainer choose whether to list it or not, the allow to choose the price and the tags. That looks quite more transparent than many other brandable marketplaces. The cons? Do search algorithms work fairly with all sellers? It’s difficult to find a way to make that part transparent. And above all, will the quality of the inventory fall? As there’s no ‘curated selection’ anymore. Interesting moves in this part of the domain industry.