8 ms·

How to find a short domain name

154 points by dwyer 15y ago

mmorey 15y ago
This coupled with the importXML feature of Google Docs is very useful.
ck2 15y ago
It's probably perfectly honest but this almost feels like a turk exercise to get other people to find short names for you.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
Kiro 15y ago
It should be possible to randomize. I'm only getting domain names starting with ba.
drostie 15y ago
This is beautiful, but it's such a shame that US law enforcement have been stealing .com domains from people for things that their users have done. We've had a bunch of Hacker News threads and I don't want to resurrect old beasts of that sort, but some option for non dot-com names would be wonderful. (Especially because .com reminds me of 1999-2001 at this point and it seems like we designers should perhaps be treating it as a ten-year-old fashion.)
- Jebus 15y ago
  This, I was gonna say the same. Who wants a .com? Not me
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- drewonstuff 15y ago
  I couldn't disagree more with that we should be treating .com as passe. While .me or whatever is "cool", the majority of the world still relates to .com's the most. I'm in Taiwan right now and the people here probably have no idea what a .me or a .it is. They are using .com.tw, not .me.tw (and yes, of course I understand that .me is from Montenegro and this would never be possible). And the "reminds me of 1999-2001" just sounds silly...it goes without saying that there have been thousands of successful .com's since 2001, like the one you are looking at right now.
  - shingen 15y ago
    I agree. A quick glance at the top 5,000 domains in terms of traffic more than demonstrates the sheer dominance of the .com brand for domains. It's beyond overwhelming. There are very few relevant .me or .io (etc) domains. That will continue to be the case for years to come. It's not Twitter.me or TwitPic.me or yfrog.me, it's not Tumblr.me, it's not Pinterest.me, it's not Groupon.me, it's not homeaway.me, it's not yelp.me. All the major success stories online will continue to be branded primarily through .com - and those that start out as .me or .io will move to .com as they can afford to purchase the prime domain.
  - brianbreslin 15y ago
    Actually .me.tw would be possible, just as there are .gov.tw etc. so .com in the .com.tw is not a top-level domain (.tw is), it is a 2nd level domain in this case. so there could be xyz.tw just like .co was originally exclusive to government of colombia and you could only get 2nd level domains, ex domain.com.co etc.
    - drewonstuff 15y ago
      thanks for clarifying, I edited-in that line in () mainly to qualify that I was sort of joking about the .me.tw. I now know it wasn't a joke.
leejw00t354 15y ago
On some domains I get a invalid domain message: bbaaw.com is an invalid domain name Any ideas on why this is appearing or what it means?
- philjr 15y ago
  looks like a bug
tokenadult 15y ago
How do we know that as these searches are executed that the domain names don't become unavailable, because someone parks on them? That historically has been the problem with domain-name searches. I'd like an absolute guarantee that the searching is done in a manner that doesn't alert registrars or their cronies to new domain names to park on before running many searches here. The application is a text-searching application, so I was a bit startled to see "consonant" misspelled as "constonant" throughout the pull-down menus. Usually I expect programmers who work with text string-matching to be attentive to details of natural language text.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  That was my first thought too. Any time I search for a domain name these days, my process goes something like: 1. Enter it into a web browser, see if it's in use or parked 2. If not, run whois on it at the commandline. 3. If not, decide whether I want to buy it. If so, do so right away, otherwise assume it will be lost in a day or so. And I'm not even 100% sure I can trust the browser search, depending on what the DNS server I happen to be on does with failed lookups.
  - larrys 15y ago
    I personally don't feel that this is a reason for concern (very very small chance but yes it is possible). But there is a faster way anyway, cutting out web server not responding etc. So in any case if you wanted to lessen that chance you could query any public nameserver, assuming you can trust that nameserver. In a command window, using nslookup as an example, the process would be (using google public dns server but you can use anything that's the point): nslookup > server 8.8.8.8 Default server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53 > skymarshal.com Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: skymarshal.com Address: 208.91.197.26 (comment: name taken!) > skymarshalxyz.com Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53 server can't find skymarshalxyz.com: NXDOMAIN > www.skymarkshalxyz.com (I made this up) Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53 server can't find www.skymarkshalxyz.com: NXDOMAIN > exit "can't find" - name might be available - we have determined it's not resolving. Could be a dns issue of course but it's a good first step. Doing with a browser can give you MORE of a false positive. DNS could respond with an address but the site could be down. Of course getting no response to DNS doesn't ALWAYS mean the domain is available but it's generally fairly accurate. At that point you would do a whois to confirm. You can write a shell script of course to automate this from the command line.
meow 15y ago
Takes so long to generate first 50 names even when searching with just the defaults... looks like they don't really cache anything..
- clone1018 15y ago
  Cache random results?
  - shingen 15y ago
    No such thing as a random result when you have static selection boxes defining specific input. The results are obviously restrained by what letter combinations you pick (ie finite). You could make an argument that caching all the possible combinations would be unreasonable for what's likely a low cost setup. However, I'd argue in favor of caching with both a popular and a simple reduction scheme. Could speed it up radically by just caching on the first letter / number.
youlost_thegame 15y ago
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what's up with the letter Q?
- drblast 15y ago
  Maybe it's like scrabble where you'd always want a u afterward. It's a rather odd constraint given the other options.
WA 15y ago
I got this error a little later, when the script was already running for a while: Error Connecting To Server: whois.crsnic.net Maybe you should not use "whois" but just a simple "host" or "ping" to resolve whether or not a domain is free. When in doubt, you can still do an "whois", but for a heuristic approach, it would be waaay faster.
- ericabiz 15y ago
  Faster, but inaccurate. There are plenty of domains that are registered, but the DNS doesn't resolve. That doesn't mean they are available to register!
  - gravitronic 15y ago
    When I wrote a domain searcher script what I did was filter first by names that return are resolvable, and then whois the remainder. Reduces load on the dependent whois server whose terms of service usually say "don't run scripts against me"
    - WA 15y ago
      That's exactly the approach I tried to suggest: Find as many correct replies first, because there certainly are hosts which names can be resolved and try the whois-approach on everything else.
- brianbreslin 15y ago
  do you think that would return too many false-positives? many of these domain search tools use an api for whois or for searching.
damusnet 15y ago
Does it mean that all 4-letter-.com domain names are taken?
- gigq 15y ago
  Yep, all 4 letter domains were registered back in 2007 (http://www.dotsauce.com/2007/11/02/four-letter-domains-all-registered/ http://www.dotsauce.com/2007/11/02/four-letter-domains-all-r...). Of course domains expire or are sold between owners so getting a 4 letter domain is still possible.
  - guylhem 15y ago
    And you can get them for cheap. Got one .com as recently as last year, with the .org as a freebie. I'm now considering selling my 3 letters/numbers domain name - .net and .org.
    - brador 15y ago
      How much was the .com? I've seen offered prices of $5K+ for fairly generic 4 letter domains...lot's of speculators buying and holdnig I guess...
      - guylhem 15y ago
        Speculation- yes. I paid just below 100, and I considered that a tad expansive. It's not a word but it is easy to say and to remember, and I needed one for a project, so I got it thinking I could reuse it later.
- itsprofitbaron 15y ago
  When they all were taken mainly by domainers they were going crazy that they'd be the new LLL.com's where the prices went from $xxx to $xx,xxx in a very short period of time. However, what has happened with LLLL.com's is that they went very quickly to $xxx but have since dropped considerably so you can acquire LLLL.com's (4 letter.com's) from $15 upwards although if you want a really nice LLLL.com such as Made, Ball etc then those prices are different regardless of it being an LLLL or not. Just have a look on Domainer forums such as Namepros, DNF, DigitalPoint etc and you can find some really cheap.
jasonkester 15y ago
Am I right to be suspicious of this service if the best name it could find for their own domain was zegup?
- moonchrome 15y ago
  >babof.com is available Yey !
  - sebastianavina 15y ago
    so do babof, babef,...
- techiferous 15y ago
  > best name Best (1) currently available (2) 5-letter domain name. I think they did well for these standards.
  - Natsu 15y ago
    True, but it's not really that necessary a restriction unless there's some reason that five characters is special. I mean, would you rather have mxurp.com or something meaningful like ycombinator.com?
matt1 15y ago
A few years back I built Domain Pigeon, a similar tool, that generated web 2.0-style domain names and made them available to visitors. One of my big lessons learned from that experience was that web 2.0 style domain names are NOT good domain names. More often than not people can't remember them and when they can, they misspell it and if they can spell it, it's only because someone had to spell it out when telling it to them. I recently launched a follow up to Domain Pigeon called Lean Domain Search which I think handles the problem a lot better [1]. Rather than generating random words, it pairs your search phrase with 1,500+ other keywords and instantly shows you which are available. In this way, every domain it generates is a combination of two or more actual words which makes it much easier to remember and explain to people. By all means explore and see what your options are, but try to pick a name that will be easy for people to remember and easy to spell. [1] http://www.leandomainsearch.com http://www.leandomainsearch.com
- neilk 15y ago
  I recently obtained a five-letter domain name (Grovr) in .org/.net/.com, and felt good about doing so on the cheap. I hit on the that name out of desperation leading to silliness. The idea has to do with directed acyclic graphs of trust relationships, hence trees, hence "grove". There aren't a lot of real-world analogs, so I'd been struggling to find some short name that explained the concept. I was working with a few others until recently and they had picked names like "layervote" which I never liked much. "Grovr" is obscure, but it makes me happy, and I'll probably make trees the fundamental graphic theme and metaphor. But now you're telling me that misspellings are actually a big problem? How much of a problem, quantitatively? Does that outweigh googlability? (On the other hand, if you add one letter, there is a popular children's TV character there which I'll never outrank, so that might be a problem.)
  - matt1 15y ago
    "But now you're telling me that misspellings are actually a big problem? How much of a problem, quantitatively?" When you verbally tell someone about your site, how do you do it? Do you spell out the domain name? If not, people are probably having trouble finding it because it's not a standard spelling. And looking at the name I'm not even sure how to say it (is it "groover" or "grover"?). If you do spell it out, that should be an even bigger indication that people are going to have trouble because you had to spell it out in order for them to find it.
pg_bot 15y ago
You should be focusing on the quality of the domain and not the length. This point is clearly illustrated when you use this service, as almost every domain generated is awful. While it is true that a domain can be too long, you will certainly find better domain names by looking around 8-14 characters instead of 4-7.
shocks 15y ago
I felt a bit limited by this, so I've just knocked up a similar tool with far more flexibility. Still actively developing it, but it's far quicker already. http://dev.mindfuzz.net/domain/ http://dev.mindfuzz.net/domain/ Edit: Grammar.
- larrys 15y ago
  Much better. I like this. Reminds me of when I did the same thing years ago with regexs to grab 3/4 letter .com (really there were so many available back then you had to whittle the list down).
  - shocks 15y ago
    Thanks! I'm looking at adding more tld's and words/synonyms.
- arkitaip 15y ago
  This returns lots of false positives. Certain patterns, LLLL, result in very small result sets (5 items) but when re-searching the pattern, a different set is returned.
  - shocks 15y ago
    Yes, because I use more of a Monte Carlo approach than a systematic approach. zegup.com is always alphabetic, but since the results are so slow it could take a long time to get to the end of the alphabet.
    - RuggeroAltair 15y ago
      +1 for randomizing. do you produce the string with the monte carlo choosing within a specific subset? I'm not sure why it wouldn't produce more than 5 combinations and then 5 different combinations... also, if you have-time/like, you can probably implement a quick hash on the fly for the domains already returned to avoid listing the same domain twice in a search with few alternatives, it should be quick. but cool tool!
opendomain 15y ago
We have many short domains: if you want to take on holly wood- you could use Free.TV or if you want a communication startup, try XG.org, Free-fi.com, wusb.com, or wide-fi.com. News site? Syndi.com, bloog.com. Hyperlocal? 4ny.com or 4dc.com. Keyword? Liposculpture.com non-profit? Manna.org My favorite for Big Data is NoSQL.com While this post is a plug for my open source project OpenDomain - please note that we are not for profit. We have given domain such as Drupal.com, OsCon.com, OpenAjax.org, and Ecmascript.org all for FREE EDIT: spelling errors edit 2: please do not downvote - as I said before we are not for profit and we support open source. I would love for anyone on hacker news to use any of our domains
johnstalcup 15y ago
this thing outputs crap. every single name/domain name generator i've seen has been underwhelming, including this one. do this: * use an emotional connotation dictionary to classify a bunch of poems. * for each emotion category train a markov chain. * allow users to select a couple of emotions, then combine those emotion's markov chains and generate text.
- alanfalcon 15y ago
  I have an iPhone program called "Inspiro" which generates phrases, story ideas, etc. Great for improv or a random laugh. Got my blog domain idea "syncing dreams" from it, and I'm happy with that. No, it isn't checking for domain availability of course, but the combinations are unusual enough that you'll probably find the domain available. A few Inspiro results: charmless koala whispering playgrounds day-glow demons juicy naked mole rats forging ice You can generate different kinds of nonsense, like: ruthlessly sneezing on perfect phrases cheerfully grabbing handfuls of fascinated buildings repeating naughty garden hoses So, fun for strange ideas that make your brain get creative. My favorite tool for generating actual domain names though is easily http://impossibility.org/ http://impossibility.org/
  - johnstalcup 15y ago
    that sounds pretty good. this is kind of a tangent but kind of related: you can use a reverse dictionary (http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml) as a sort of "multi word thesaurus" when trying to condense a couple of ideas down into one word
RuggeroAltair 15y ago
Bah, it doesn't even randomize the access. I put consTonant consTonant and of the million possibilities it started checking all the bb___ ones... not so useful if they show just 50 and the only thing they allow you to do is to keep going with the next 50... I wonder who designed the algorithm...
ohashi 15y ago
http://www.kevinohashi.com/17/04/2011/other-24000-available-brandables-com-domains-full-list http://www.kevinohashi.com/17/04/2011/other-24000-available-... 24000 5 letter 'brandables'
dreeves 15y ago
Related: http://messymatters.com/nominology http://messymatters.com/nominology (discusses desiderata for names: evocativity, brevity, greppability, googlability, pronounceability, spellability, verbability)
davidbanham 15y ago
That's not how you spell consonant.

154 points by dwyer 15y ago

This coupled with the importXML feature of Google Docs is very useful.

ck2 15y ago

It's probably perfectly honest but this almost feels like a turk exercise to get other people to find short names for you.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

Kiro 15y ago

It should be possible to randomize. I'm only getting domain names starting with ba.

drostie 15y ago

This is beautiful, but it's such a shame that US law enforcement have been stealing .com domains from people for things that their users have done. We've had a bunch of Hacker News threads and I don't want to resurrect old beasts of that sort, but some option for non dot-com names would be wonderful. (Especially because .com reminds me of 1999-2001 at this point and it seems like we designers should perhaps be treating it as a ten-year-old fashion.)

Jebus 15y ago
This, I was gonna say the same. Who wants a .com? Not me
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
drewonstuff 15y ago
I couldn't disagree more with that we should be treating .com as passe. While .me or whatever is "cool", the majority of the world still relates to .com's the most. I'm in Taiwan right now and the people here probably have no idea what a .me or a .it is. They are using .com.tw, not .me.tw (and yes, of course I understand that .me is from Montenegro and this would never be possible). And the "reminds me of 1999-2001" just sounds silly...it goes without saying that there have been thousands of successful .com's since 2001, like the one you are looking at right now.
- shingen 15y ago
  I agree. A quick glance at the top 5,000 domains in terms of traffic more than demonstrates the sheer dominance of the .com brand for domains. It's beyond overwhelming. There are very few relevant .me or .io (etc) domains. That will continue to be the case for years to come. It's not Twitter.me or TwitPic.me or yfrog.me, it's not Tumblr.me, it's not Pinterest.me, it's not Groupon.me, it's not homeaway.me, it's not yelp.me. All the major success stories online will continue to be branded primarily through .com - and those that start out as .me or .io will move to .com as they can afford to purchase the prime domain.
- brianbreslin 15y ago
  Actually .me.tw would be possible, just as there are .gov.tw etc. so .com in the .com.tw is not a top-level domain (.tw is), it is a 2nd level domain in this case. so there could be xyz.tw just like .co was originally exclusive to government of colombia and you could only get 2nd level domains, ex domain.com.co etc.
  - drewonstuff 15y ago
    thanks for clarifying, I edited-in that line in () mainly to qualify that I was sort of joking about the .me.tw. I now know it wasn't a joke.

leejw00t354 15y ago

On some domains I get a invalid domain message: bbaaw.com is an invalid domain name Any ideas on why this is appearing or what it means?

philjr 15y ago
looks like a bug

tokenadult 15y ago

How do we know that as these searches are executed that the domain names don't become unavailable, because someone parks on them? That historically has been the problem with domain-name searches. I'd like an absolute guarantee that the searching is done in a manner that doesn't alert registrars or their cronies to new domain names to park on before running many searches here. The application is a text-searching application, so I was a bit startled to see "consonant" misspelled as "constonant" throughout the pull-down menus. Usually I expect programmers who work with text string-matching to be attentive to details of natural language text.

SkyMarshal 15y ago
That was my first thought too. Any time I search for a domain name these days, my process goes something like: 1. Enter it into a web browser, see if it's in use or parked 2. If not, run whois on it at the commandline. 3. If not, decide whether I want to buy it. If so, do so right away, otherwise assume it will be lost in a day or so. And I'm not even 100% sure I can trust the browser search, depending on what the DNS server I happen to be on does with failed lookups.
- larrys 15y ago
  I personally don't feel that this is a reason for concern (very very small chance but yes it is possible). But there is a faster way anyway, cutting out web server not responding etc. So in any case if you wanted to lessen that chance you could query any public nameserver, assuming you can trust that nameserver. In a command window, using nslookup as an example, the process would be (using google public dns server but you can use anything that's the point): nslookup > server 8.8.8.8 Default server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53 > skymarshal.com Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: skymarshal.com Address: 208.91.197.26 (comment: name taken!) > skymarshalxyz.com Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53 server can't find skymarshalxyz.com: NXDOMAIN > www.skymarkshalxyz.com (I made this up) Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53 server can't find www.skymarkshalxyz.com: NXDOMAIN > exit "can't find" - name might be available - we have determined it's not resolving. Could be a dns issue of course but it's a good first step. Doing with a browser can give you MORE of a false positive. DNS could respond with an address but the site could be down. Of course getting no response to DNS doesn't ALWAYS mean the domain is available but it's generally fairly accurate. At that point you would do a whois to confirm. You can write a shell script of course to automate this from the command line.

meow 15y ago

Takes so long to generate first 50 names even when searching with just the defaults... looks like they don't really cache anything..

clone1018 15y ago
Cache random results?
- shingen 15y ago
  No such thing as a random result when you have static selection boxes defining specific input. The results are obviously restrained by what letter combinations you pick (ie finite). You could make an argument that caching all the possible combinations would be unreasonable for what's likely a low cost setup. However, I'd argue in favor of caching with both a popular and a simple reduction scheme. Could speed it up radically by just caching on the first letter / number.

youlost_thegame 15y ago

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what's up with the letter Q?

drblast 15y ago
Maybe it's like scrabble where you'd always want a u afterward. It's a rather odd constraint given the other options.

WA 15y ago

I got this error a little later, when the script was already running for a while: Error Connecting To Server: whois.crsnic.net Maybe you should not use "whois" but just a simple "host" or "ping" to resolve whether or not a domain is free. When in doubt, you can still do an "whois", but for a heuristic approach, it would be waaay faster.

ericabiz 15y ago
Faster, but inaccurate. There are plenty of domains that are registered, but the DNS doesn't resolve. That doesn't mean they are available to register!
- gravitronic 15y ago
  When I wrote a domain searcher script what I did was filter first by names that return are resolvable, and then whois the remainder. Reduces load on the dependent whois server whose terms of service usually say "don't run scripts against me"
  - WA 15y ago
    That's exactly the approach I tried to suggest: Find as many correct replies first, because there certainly are hosts which names can be resolved and try the whois-approach on everything else.
brianbreslin 15y ago
do you think that would return too many false-positives? many of these domain search tools use an api for whois or for searching.

damusnet 15y ago

Does it mean that all 4-letter-.com domain names are taken?

gigq 15y ago
Yep, all 4 letter domains were registered back in 2007 (http://www.dotsauce.com/2007/11/02/four-letter-domains-all-registered/ http://www.dotsauce.com/2007/11/02/four-letter-domains-all-r...). Of course domains expire or are sold between owners so getting a 4 letter domain is still possible.
- guylhem 15y ago
  And you can get them for cheap. Got one .com as recently as last year, with the .org as a freebie. I'm now considering selling my 3 letters/numbers domain name - .net and .org.
  - brador 15y ago
    How much was the .com? I've seen offered prices of $5K+ for fairly generic 4 letter domains...lot's of speculators buying and holdnig I guess...
    - guylhem 15y ago
      Speculation- yes. I paid just below 100, and I considered that a tad expansive. It's not a word but it is easy to say and to remember, and I needed one for a project, so I got it thinking I could reuse it later.
itsprofitbaron 15y ago
When they all were taken mainly by domainers they were going crazy that they'd be the new LLL.com's where the prices went from $xxx to $xx,xxx in a very short period of time. However, what has happened with LLLL.com's is that they went very quickly to $xxx but have since dropped considerably so you can acquire LLLL.com's (4 letter.com's) from $15 upwards although if you want a really nice LLLL.com such as Made, Ball etc then those prices are different regardless of it being an LLLL or not. Just have a look on Domainer forums such as Namepros, DNF, DigitalPoint etc and you can find some really cheap.

jasonkester 15y ago

Am I right to be suspicious of this service if the best name it could find for their own domain was zegup?

moonchrome 15y ago
>babof.com is available Yey !
- sebastianavina 15y ago
  so do babof, babef,...
techiferous 15y ago
> best name Best (1) currently available (2) 5-letter domain name. I think they did well for these standards.
- Natsu 15y ago
  True, but it's not really that necessary a restriction unless there's some reason that five characters is special. I mean, would you rather have mxurp.com or something meaningful like ycombinator.com?

matt1 15y ago

A few years back I built Domain Pigeon, a similar tool, that generated web 2.0-style domain names and made them available to visitors. One of my big lessons learned from that experience was that web 2.0 style domain names are NOT good domain names. More often than not people can't remember them and when they can, they misspell it and if they can spell it, it's only because someone had to spell it out when telling it to them. I recently launched a follow up to Domain Pigeon called Lean Domain Search which I think handles the problem a lot better [1]. Rather than generating random words, it pairs your search phrase with 1,500+ other keywords and instantly shows you which are available. In this way, every domain it generates is a combination of two or more actual words which makes it much easier to remember and explain to people. By all means explore and see what your options are, but try to pick a name that will be easy for people to remember and easy to spell. [1] http://www.leandomainsearch.com http://www.leandomainsearch.com

neilk 15y ago
I recently obtained a five-letter domain name (Grovr) in .org/.net/.com, and felt good about doing so on the cheap. I hit on the that name out of desperation leading to silliness. The idea has to do with directed acyclic graphs of trust relationships, hence trees, hence "grove". There aren't a lot of real-world analogs, so I'd been struggling to find some short name that explained the concept. I was working with a few others until recently and they had picked names like "layervote" which I never liked much. "Grovr" is obscure, but it makes me happy, and I'll probably make trees the fundamental graphic theme and metaphor. But now you're telling me that misspellings are actually a big problem? How much of a problem, quantitatively? Does that outweigh googlability? (On the other hand, if you add one letter, there is a popular children's TV character there which I'll never outrank, so that might be a problem.)
- matt1 15y ago
  "But now you're telling me that misspellings are actually a big problem? How much of a problem, quantitatively?" When you verbally tell someone about your site, how do you do it? Do you spell out the domain name? If not, people are probably having trouble finding it because it's not a standard spelling. And looking at the name I'm not even sure how to say it (is it "groover" or "grover"?). If you do spell it out, that should be an even bigger indication that people are going to have trouble because you had to spell it out in order for them to find it.

pg_bot 15y ago

You should be focusing on the quality of the domain and not the length. This point is clearly illustrated when you use this service, as almost every domain generated is awful. While it is true that a domain can be too long, you will certainly find better domain names by looking around 8-14 characters instead of 4-7.

shocks 15y ago

I felt a bit limited by this, so I've just knocked up a similar tool with far more flexibility. Still actively developing it, but it's far quicker already. http://dev.mindfuzz.net/domain/ http://dev.mindfuzz.net/domain/ Edit: Grammar.

larrys 15y ago
Much better. I like this. Reminds me of when I did the same thing years ago with regexs to grab 3/4 letter .com (really there were so many available back then you had to whittle the list down).
- shocks 15y ago
  Thanks! I'm looking at adding more tld's and words/synonyms.
arkitaip 15y ago
This returns lots of false positives. Certain patterns, LLLL, result in very small result sets (5 items) but when re-searching the pattern, a different set is returned.
- shocks 15y ago
  Yes, because I use more of a Monte Carlo approach than a systematic approach. zegup.com is always alphabetic, but since the results are so slow it could take a long time to get to the end of the alphabet.
  - RuggeroAltair 15y ago
    +1 for randomizing. do you produce the string with the monte carlo choosing within a specific subset? I'm not sure why it wouldn't produce more than 5 combinations and then 5 different combinations... also, if you have-time/like, you can probably implement a quick hash on the fly for the domains already returned to avoid listing the same domain twice in a search with few alternatives, it should be quick. but cool tool!

opendomain 15y ago

We have many short domains: if you want to take on holly wood- you could use Free.TV or if you want a communication startup, try XG.org, Free-fi.com, wusb.com, or wide-fi.com. News site? Syndi.com, bloog.com. Hyperlocal? 4ny.com or 4dc.com. Keyword? Liposculpture.com non-profit? Manna.org My favorite for Big Data is NoSQL.com While this post is a plug for my open source project OpenDomain - please note that we are not for profit. We have given domain such as Drupal.com, OsCon.com, OpenAjax.org, and Ecmascript.org all for FREE EDIT: spelling errors edit 2: please do not downvote - as I said before we are not for profit and we support open source. I would love for anyone on hacker news to use any of our domains

johnstalcup 15y ago

this thing outputs crap. every single name/domain name generator i've seen has been underwhelming, including this one. do this: * use an emotional connotation dictionary to classify a bunch of poems. * for each emotion category train a markov chain. * allow users to select a couple of emotions, then combine those emotion's markov chains and generate text.

alanfalcon 15y ago
I have an iPhone program called "Inspiro" which generates phrases, story ideas, etc. Great for improv or a random laugh. Got my blog domain idea "syncing dreams" from it, and I'm happy with that. No, it isn't checking for domain availability of course, but the combinations are unusual enough that you'll probably find the domain available. A few Inspiro results: charmless koala whispering playgrounds day-glow demons juicy naked mole rats forging ice You can generate different kinds of nonsense, like: ruthlessly sneezing on perfect phrases cheerfully grabbing handfuls of fascinated buildings repeating naughty garden hoses So, fun for strange ideas that make your brain get creative. My favorite tool for generating actual domain names though is easily http://impossibility.org/ http://impossibility.org/
- johnstalcup 15y ago
  that sounds pretty good. this is kind of a tangent but kind of related: you can use a reverse dictionary (http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml) as a sort of "multi word thesaurus" when trying to condense a couple of ideas down into one word

RuggeroAltair 15y ago

Bah, it doesn't even randomize the access. I put consTonant consTonant and of the million possibilities it started checking all the bb___ ones... not so useful if they show just 50 and the only thing they allow you to do is to keep going with the next 50... I wonder who designed the algorithm...

ohashi 15y ago

http://www.kevinohashi.com/17/04/2011/other-24000-available-brandables-com-domains-full-list http://www.kevinohashi.com/17/04/2011/other-24000-available-... 24000 5 letter 'brandables'

dreeves 15y ago

Related: http://messymatters.com/nominology http://messymatters.com/nominology (discusses desiderata for names: evocativity, brevity, greppability, googlability, pronounceability, spellability, verbability)

davidbanham 15y ago

That's not how you spell consonant.