Correct non existent domain name to nearest match

Question

I'm looking for a service that tells you the nearest match of a non existent domain, because it was misspelled by the user. For example, if an user writes 'hotmail.con', send a query with that and obtain as a result 'hotmail.com'.

Answer 1

You've picked a hard problem. A domain can be 1-63 characters long, shall contain characters [a-z0-9-], and shall not start with a hyphen. Brute forcing it not an option. If the user types in hotmail.con you could search misspellings of it, which would try homail.com and hotmale.com, which may or may not be accurate domain names, who is to know WHICH mis-spelling is the correct one? The computer would have to return a list of options to the user: "Did you mean this domain name, or maybe or that domain name?".

You might be interested in Peter Norvig's spelling corrector that Google uses to spell check queries that come in. It's one of the best spelling correctors on the planet.

http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

Peter Norvig's Spell checker should work provided you had a body of correct domain names which is up to date. You could create your own list on the fly, by keeping a list of which sites the user has been to, and using those as the body of domain names to check against. That way, when the user selects "hotmail.con" it finds hotmail.com in your list. However, this does not protect the user from accidentally visiting: "hotmale.com". Because that is a valid site.

Here is a stackoverflow qustion about how to get all the domain names:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4539155/how-to-get-all-the-domain-names

The best idea is to think outside the box and do it like firefox does it. When the user starts typing hotmail.com, what they usually do is click a textbox, type "h", then "o". Have a dropdown come out with recently visited domain names that start with that.