I’m happy to announce that Lean Domain Search performed its 500,000th search today. That’s not a huge milestone in the grand scheme of things, but certainly, one that I’m proud of. Thank you all for continuing to use it, share it, and for providing feedback and encouragement along the way.
Performance improvements update
Over the past few months a few folks have emailed me to report slow search times. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to optimize every aspect of Lean Domain Search’s domain name generation process and am happy to report that it has paid off.
At the end of April the average search took over six seconds; it now takes less than two:
Put another way, at the end of April only about 32% of searches took less than three seconds. That number is now around 86%:
A lot of data
There were a number of different areas that were improved, but there’s one in particular that I’d like to talk about because some of the developers out there might find it helpful for their own applications.
When you perform a search on Lean Domain Search, it executes a JSONP request to a separate server to generate available domain names based on your search term. If the request times out or throws an error, I track that event via MixPanel. By looking at the number of search errors and segmenting by operating system, I noticed an interesting trend:
The majority of errors were occurring for Windows users. Why though? My first instinct was that it must be an issue with Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer has a reputation for being the source of cross-browser compatibility issues so it makes sense that it would be the cause of these problems. However, segmenting the search errors by browser type showed that that was not the case:
In reality, Chrome and Firefox users saw encountered more errors as percentage of the total than Internet Explorer. If it’s not the browser that’s causing the issue for Windows users then what was it?
Lean Domain Search 