GoDaddy wants to help small businesses compete using AI
GoDaddy may not spring to mind as a developer of cutting-edge AI technology, but the internet company is currently employing new tech to help small businesses compete with tech giants.
“If you have the local bookstore that has built their website on GoDaddy, that local bookstore needs to compete with Amazon,” GoDaddy director of engineering Jason Ansel told VentureBeat in an interview. “And Amazon’s using a lot of machine learning. Amazon is a machine learning powerhouse. [So] basically, how can we use our machine learning expertise at GoDaddy to help that little bookstore compete in an increasingly machine learning-dominated world?”
One of the most significant issues facing those small businesses is a shortage of data compared to their huge competitors. But Ansel says GoDaddy is in a position to pool information across its massive customer base to create intelligent systems that help them all.
The first project in that vein is a system the company claims can value internet domain names better than a human can. It uses new advancements in artificial neural networks to achieve superhuman results, with the goal of creating a valuation metric for domain names that works much as Zillow’s Zestimate works for homes.
“You have this domain valuation industry, which is dominated by a small number of experts who know a lot about how to value domains and have these really large portfolios,” Ansel said. “And it’s also an industry where there’s a huge variation in prices. People don’t really know what domains are worth. And so there’s a lot of people who either pay too much or pay too little.”
GoDaddy tested its system against a group of human experts using a random sample of domain names and their sale prices. The algorithm was more than 20 percent better than the human expert, judged on root mean square error.
