For the last few years I've been toying with a variety of techniques for finding available domain names. This is one of my more recent attempts that I thought would be useful to all of you on HN. I created a simple search and alphabetical lookup with pagination to be able to browse through these domains as easily as possible. I built the website search functionality yesterday, so it was quick and dirty (but hopefully the UI is clean enough).<p>Since the current listing is cached, the only way to tell if a domain is truly still available (and some other HN member hasn't picked it up), you need to click the "Test" button to run a new WHOIS test. If the domain is taken, it'll automatically be removed and you'll be informed. If not, you'll get a nice little success message with both purchase buttons.<p>I'd love any suggestions. Let us know if you find anything good :)
Hey Corey, Lean Domain Search creator here -- nice site and list.<p>One thing I'd recommend is to have users click on the results to show them registration options. This gives you the added benefit of being able to automatically double-check that the domain is still available which makes for a much smoother workflow. This would also free up space on your interface which could let you display the results in multiple columns, letting you fit more results on a single page. You can see this in action at Lean Domain Search by searching for a keyword and then clicking one of the available results, ex: <a href="http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=jquery" rel="nofollow">http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=jquery</a><p>Overall nice start though. Looking forward to seeing other domain name generation algorithm results.
Possible bug: as I'm scrolling down any list, for example <a href="http://www.coreyballou.com/six-character-domain-names/L/" rel="nofollow">http://www.coreyballou.com/six-character-domain-names/L/</a>, and the infinite scroll refreshes at the bottom, I'm seeing many, many dupes – like the list is repeating. Makes the search very frustrating to keep seeing the same words. I'd second the request for a downloadable text list of names if you're feeling generous. :)
cool idea but the design is frustrating.<p>there's a lot of noise on the page considering all I want to see are the names and they only occupy about 1/16th of the screen currently. would be more easily consumable if you grouped by bigrams and had each row devoted to a given leading bigram.<p>al<p><pre><code> hi fi ...
alhico alfiof
alhiea alfiou
...
</code></pre>
be<p>...<p>if i click on a name, then show the affiliate links.. otherwise they're just wasting space.<p>given that all the domains you're displaying are the same length, you have a nice constraint to work with in the design and could really use space well.
Thanks for this - any way you'd be willing to post the raw list somewhere? I'd love to search and sort it with some other NLP factors (pronounceability, etc)
Thanks for all of the comments today. I just barely added infinite scroll. I didn't have time to merge it with the pagination functionality, so changing the paginator at the top will reset the infinite scroll (and I'm not yet using HTML5 history and hashing). I'll get around to that in the near future, but this should help you all find things a bit faster.
You know what would make searching easier? Serve the raw ascii list. I know you have affiliate links and all but a list is worth more. In fact, I'll pay you $10 for your list. I'd pay you $15 a month for a raw data feed to your list.<p>Make a company out of the data you mined, don't make money for a namecheap and godaddy!
Perhaps this is good for trademarkable names that will impress investors.<p>There are still many names of the form<p>XY.com<p>where X and Y are two keywords relevant to your business. Very little is certain in SEO, but I've never met an SEO who didn't believe that keywords in the domain name will help you get traffic from people looking for "X", "Y" and "X Y".<p>The cost effectiveness of finding a good domain name with keywords is excellent for a "free" name and even fair in some cases if you spend $1k for a domain name. Compare that to the high costs and risks of link building and content creation.
Something I just noticed: in your alphabetical list to narrow the results, it skips from E to H, indicating there is nothing with F. If you search for F, though, there are 25 pages of results.
Nice. You should run the domains through domai.nr's "info" API (<a href="http://domai.nr/api/docs/json#info-api" rel="nofollow">http://domai.nr/api/docs/json#info-api</a>), so the user doesn't have to manually test by clicking the button.
For quick scan lists like this I'd either want to have small result lists above the fold so I can keep pressing 'Next' without scrolling down or huge lists (like leandomainsearch has) where I don't need to press 'Next'.
Have you seen Domize? How is this better than that? Because it offers browsing instead of just searching?<p>Domize - <a href="http://domize.com/" rel="nofollow">http://domize.com/</a>
i want to sell htmlc.com - send me an email if you want to buy it :) have owned it for years and years - never used it - was going to be part of my htmlcenter.com site but never got around to it.