This major internet infrastructure provider deploys Grapeshot to analyse the internet and recommend domain names.

In 2005 VeriSign was looking for a new way to suggest domain names. Grapeshot delivered an automatic way to recommend related words without using a dictionary.

If buying the website address "hurricane.com" and finding the domain already taken, users would normally be suggested "tornado.com" instead.

The existing Naming Services tools were using just dictionaries and rules to recommend other available domain names, but these suggestions were not necessarily topical. So VeriSign looked to Grapeshot to supply tools that could link "hurricane" with "Katrina" or "New Orleans" effortlessly.

Grapeshot was deployed in 2006 to help answer over 10 million domain name registration requests per day, whereby the domain suggestions topically recommended to users are powered by Grapeshot. Grapeshot's understanding of the relative value of words can help it link "skiing" to "Alps" or "chalet" without any use of a dictionary or rule-based look-up system.

Grapeshot has been embedded in the wholesale naming services products which VeriSign, as a custodian of domain names and member of ICANN, sells value added services to domain name retailers such as Network Solutions and Go Daddy. Grapeshot provides topical recommendations based on a running analysis of the internet news, and is one of four integrated methods deployed by VeriSign.

See:

http://www.verisign.com/domain-name-services/current-registrars/domain-suggestion-service/index.html

http://www.verisign.com/domain-name-services/domain-information-center/domain-name-resources/domainnamesuggestion-datasheet.pdf

The VeriSign engineers based in Washington DC were pleasantly surprised with the Grapeshot code. "It really does what is says on the box" and "wow, it is so fast" were two positive remarks on the compact algorithmic code delivered by Grapeshot.

This was important feedback for the Grapeshot team in 2006, when the new Grapeshot code was first being put to work on large scale systems in the US market. The programmers at VeriSign showed Grapeshot to their peers, and that is how Grapeshot grew into three different project applications within VeriSign.

An interesting application of Grapeshot developed by another team of VeriSign engineers was the research and analysis of the Internet itself.

VeriSign's position on ICANN, in some ways the global governing body of the Internet, meant it was interested to understand the shape and diversity of the internet's websites.

Grapeshot was used to crawl over 100 million websites and categorise them to one of 317 industry categories - helping to reveal the nature of who publishes what on the open internet. This reach extended beyond the 70 million .com domains into other territories as well.

After the initial success with Grapeshot's solutions for domain name recommendations, VeriSign started to implement Grapeshot software in the Real Time Publishing division too.

The newly acquired Moreover Technologies company was fashioned into a Real Time Publishing division, which used Grapeshot to help harvest over 300,000 fresh internet news stories each day. Grapeshot evaluated the best 10 words for each story, to improve Moreover's understanding of the news across 16 languages, including Chinese and Arabic.