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How many .com domains are available?
- jeggers5 15y ago95,743,705 are currently being used. The amount of available domains is virtually unlimited due to the fact that you could have 'dsdijhfjkdf.com' as a domain.
- JacobAldridge 15y agoAnd, for an estimated $150K and some ICAAN paperwork, www.google.dsdijhfjkdf could be yours!
- bastiat 15y agoThis is a completely useless comment. Also, I will abandon this HN account in 12 hours.... again.
- JacobAldridge 15y agoI wouldn't say completely useless (note: I'm obviously biased here) - I was making a point about the ICANN announcement and its relationship to web property in the form of available URLs. Edit: ICANN - see below.
- socillion 15y agoICANN, not ICAAN. user: bastiat created:28 days ago karma: -44 That should speak for itself. You don't have to respond to absolutely everyone.
- GMali 15y agoAnd out of those, how many are parked?
- nt_mark 15y agoThat's hard to analyse, however web traffic follows a power law distribution, http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/ranking/adamicglottometrics.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/ranking/adamicglot.... So, outside the top 100k sites in terms of traffic you could expect it's either parked or idle domains.
- hessenwolf 15y agoIt is a study we would like to do. The plan is to select a random sample of domains for each length and query a source, e.g., Alexa, show a confidence interval by length for domain traffic. The stats hypothesis would be to test whether length can be used as a predictor of traffic.
- janesvilleseo 15y agoI was taken aback by the 13 character length, I wonder how many of those are parked, what the average length is for the top 100,1000, 10000 sites according to Alexa/Google/Etc. I suspect there there is a nice split between the parked longer names and the shorter actually used as a website names.
- nt_mark 15y agoycombinator - 11 facebook - 8 Wikipedia - 9 googleusercontent.com - 21 Shorter domains definitely make sense, but probably not a good predictor in itself though they have aesthetic value.
- ohashi 15y agoFinding good domains still available is a more interesting problem than just saying there are some.
- nt_mark 15y agoIndeed, same can be said for good usernames
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- djcapelis 15y agoThere are already people in that business... the question the blog entry posed was how successful they've been in squatting on all the good domains.
- ohashi 15y agoThere are always new approaches and methods to find them.
- lachenmayer 15y agoShouldn't ICANN's decision to allow the registration of new TLDs more or less solve this problem?
- bad_user 15y agoNo, those new TLDs will be more or less worthless.
- gmaslov 15y agoWell, worthless to everyone but ICANN.
- troutwine 15y agoI haven't kept up on the debate. Why would new TLDs be worthless, approximately?
- hessenwolf 15y agoI don't think they'd be worth any more or less than any given dotcom. Uniqueness is important (try searching for help on the R programming language without using 'cran' as a keyword), but links and keywords will I am sure get you further.
- hessenwolf 15y agoOur point is that there is not really a problem with shortage...
- ez77 15y agoIs there an official channel to compile registered domains?
- growt 15y agoDNS is a good start. You'll be missing some but not much.
- ez77 15y agoDo you mean brute-force trail and error for every possible domain? That looks daunting, and an easy way to have your IP address blocked.
- nt_mark 15y agoVerisign com zone file, available for free upon request
- hessenwolf 15y agoWe needed to fax a form to them though. Travelling to the nineties was the hardest part of setting it up.
- breck 15y agoAnyone know where you can download this without sending a fax?
- dedward 15y agoThey want the fax likely because it's legally binding. They also want to ensure that it's clear they are the authoritative source for those zones - so no sharing what you download. If you want it on any regular basis.. send the fax :)
- lukeschlather 15y agoE-signatures are legally binding. Likely they want the fax to discourage anyone who actually wants the list from obtaining it.
- buzpnick2 15y agoanyway, I find that the best domain names have to be catchy, not necessarily an English word. For example Google, Greplin, and many others
- breck 15y agoHow can I get a recent copy of the Verisign .com TLD master zone file? You need to send a fax to get it from their website so I figure there's got to be a quicker way(http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domain-name-services/grow-your-domain-name-business/analyze/tld-zone-access/index.xhtml http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai...) UPDATE: I downloaded the forms. Filled them out. Signed up for a HelloFax $4.99 account. Created a new fax using HelloFax. Uploaded the 2 documents. Attached my signature. And sent it. 26 minutes after making my original comment. Not too hard :). I'll update this when I hear back. UPDATE 2: You can also pay $24.95 a month and get them here: http://www.premiumdrops.com/zones.html http://www.premiumdrops.com/zones.html
- jimmyjim 15y agoI am thoroughly unhappy about good .com domains being squatted. I can't say how many times a perfectly good domain that I would have liked to start an internet service on is being squatted with a page of "contact me if interested in domain" message -- and it's more or less useless trying to contact these persons, as they'll not reply, or demand absurd amounts for the domain.
- rooshdi 15y agoAlong with patent reform, I'm hoping there's some sort of domain squatting reform down the line. There are way too many squatters doing absolutely nothing with way too many good domains. The domain system right now seems to be working against creating value for the public and more towards creating value for the squatters. There should be some guidelines put in place to ensure domains are being purchased for the benefit of online service creation. This, however, would require a dramatic overhaul of the current domain registering process. Hopefully, this whole issue becomes less relevant as domain names become more obsolete due to web app marketplaces such as the chrome web store, but that may take some time to come to fruition.
- baudehlo 15y agoHow would you define squatting though? It's a really tough issue to legislate.
- rooshdi 15y agoIt is a tough issue, but I think setting some clear requirements for owning a domain name could go a long way. Restricting domain owners from placing parking pages and requiring them to actively work on an online service, be that a web app, web site, blog, or other online medium which provides sincere value to users. Obviously, these guidelines will go into greater detail and be adjusted as time moves on, but it's better to try to resolve this issue than allow it to continue to deter start-ups.
- ohashi 15y ago
- tzury 15y agoI was looking for the zone file during last week. Gladly, it is a fax away.
- nt_mark 15y agoI believe ICANN is looking to reform zone file access as part of the new gTLD system it's initiating. http://securityskeptic.typepad.com/the-security-skeptic/2010/02/icann-advisory-group-seeks-to-improve-tld-zone-file-access.html http://securityskeptic.typepad.com/the-security-skeptic/2010...
- edwardy20 15y agoIf only people would stop automatically assuming .com is the only way to go, we wouldn't have a domain shortage problem.
- highace 15y agoSadly, they hold the most credibility. Everyone's heard of .com, specifically the casual web users or less tech savvy. I tried .co once, but when I passed a mention of the domain on to someone else, what did they type in? That's right, .com. Locally (.co.uk for me) there's many more available, but that makes it harder to target a global audience, and also as above, a lot of people tend to try .com first, potentially introducing them to a competitor.
- jacobbijani 15y agoBarmkin.com is a pretty great domain name, actually.
- scarmig 15y agoShortages are a sign of a flawed market. What needs to be done is something similar to the radio spectrum; require a regular bidding process on a given domain (or, more likely, the set of domains that are in-demand). Squatting becomes a less desirable business when you've got to pay $100/year for an in-demand domain.
- hessenwolf 15y agoI used to work in a spectrum research lab (http://www.ctvr.ie/ http://www.ctvr.ie/). I didn't get the impression the auctioning was working all that well.
- cappaert 15y agoI was interested a while back in finding short (5 or 6 letter) .com domains still available. Wrote a little script to do a bulk check at Godaddy. There are a few variables you can alter in my script: - pre: any text BEFORE the consonant-vowel-consonant string - suf: any text AFTER the string - ext: the domain name extension (defaults to .com if left blank) - max: the maximum number of domain name results (starting at a random character) Since GoDaddy limits the bulk check to 500, the quickest way to do a domain check is to run the script setting the max at 500, then just copy and paste the result in the bulk domain lookup. Couple different examples: http://tonycappaert.com/projects/domaingen.php?suf=it&max=500 http://tonycappaert.com/projects/domaingen.php?suf=it&ma... http://tonycappaert.com/projects/domaingen.php?pre=go&suf=me&max=500&ext=.net http://tonycappaert.com/projects/domaingen.php?pre=go&su... Paste the result in the Godaddy bulk check at http://www.godaddy.com/domains/searchbulk.aspx http://www.godaddy.com/domains/searchbulk.aspx