The return from the summer holidays have been great on our end, with a new hiree, a couple of improvements on the data side and a brand new Domain Search. Happy reading!
Fayzan is joining Hunter
Our team has the chance to now have in its ranks Fayzan, a Senior backend engineer living in sunny Barcelona 🇪🇸. He works on the Go backend of Hunter, which is in particular responsible for gathering, aggregating and cleaning the data delivered to our users. His first contributions will be about Companies-related data. Stay tuned!
Better Company name to Domain name conversion
Translating company names to domain names is at the heart of Hunter. Providing relevant suggestions in the Domain Search in reaction to user input or great accuracy for imported bulk Domain Searches made up of company names are prerequisites to a smooth experience with Hunter.
With this in mind, we aimed to improve the code and infrastructure around this conversion. We have created test cases with different scenarios where our company name to domain name conversion could have been better than it was. With this, we have identified that small and medium companies were the improvement focus we needed to work on.
We set ourselves to work by improving how the algorithm scores the relevancy of the domain name compared to the company name and Elasticsearch, the search engine we use at Hunter to store data related to the companies.
These changes resulted in an incredible overall increase in accuracy. Hunter is now around 2 to 3 times more accurate than we previously were. In some instances, such as small companies, we have increased our accuracy by up to 20x times more!
Improve the names detection
In the same vein, being able to detect and split full names into first and last names is crucial to us. Previously, we encountered difficulties with full names made up of more than 2 words, or with unusual names. By rewriting our algorithm and increasing the size of our names list, we got a lot better on this front.
Hunter is now 3-5% more accurate when it comes to identifying first and last names. This might not seem like an amazing increase but, taking in account Hunter processes over 15 million Email Finders a month, this will bring us as much as half a million more results than we previously did!
A brand new Domain Search
Finally, our efforts on the Hunter application were focused on releasing a brand new version of the Domain Search. Following users’ interviews, we created a plan for creating a new and improved Domain Search, that provides a better experience. Considering the previous design was 6 years old, we felt like this redesign was more than needed!
Apart from the new look, our users also get access to advanced filters, more data about the searched company, and finally information about the technologies used on their website.
This is a selection of the work we’ve performed during the last two months, among multiple day-to-day or still in progress tasks. As always, feel free to contact us for any questions related to our processes (we use Shape Up from Basecamp), our tools (we organize ourselves with Linear) or our company.