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.
One other thing, the "LDS" favicon took me by surprise. I had tabbed away for a second, then coming back I saw LDS and thought "now how the hell did I get on Mormon church site?". Only after I clicked back to it did I realize it was your site. I live in Utah, and the Mormon church is very prevalent here, so I don't know if others would have the same thought or reaction. Just thought I'd mention it. Good luck with leandomainsearch
And yeah, agreed about the Mormon association. They really need to change their name =X
Agree 100%.
I'd like to give my positive experience with leandomainsearch.com.
I used it when coming up with potential domains for a client (that was referred by a VC - a startup ready to launch with a new domain basically.).
Although the client ended up buying a domain (for sale) that I also suggested, I didn't tell them which names I found that were "free" essentially and which names they would have to buy from an owner. Or any pricing. I didn't want to color their opinion by creating a halo around the names available for purchase.
The majority of the ideas I got for available domains were from LDS. (In all fairness I also curated that list based on my knowledge since if you've used LDS you know it presents an overwhelming number of possibilities.)
The clients budget was about $20,000 for a domain purchase. In the end we bought two domains (one the one they wanted and one which was a typo of the one they wanted) for about $3500 total.
In my opinion the LDS names were as good as the ones the client wanted to buy. In some ways I thought they were better (but of course it's not my startup and maybe I was rated them higher because I choose them..).
The idea that I gave them when considering the final list (which took them several weeks to decide on) was to go out on the street and run the names by potential clients and consumers on this particular site and to see which names resonated with them. That allowed them to hone in on a great name at a reasonable price.
In any case even though they didn't go with the LDS name it was very valuable in the process.
I encourage everyone to do this: find some premium domain names that cost $X,XXX or $XX,XXX and mix them in with results from Lean Domain Search and see if people really prefer the expensive ones. (That would actually make a really good marketing tool/game that I could implement on the site itself.)
I've said it before: as word spreads that there actually are a lot of quality available .com domain names out there, I think the premium domain name industry is going to feel it. As it should.
I ran shell scripts on 10 nodes with fast backbone connections, making DNS queries of all possible 4-letter and 5-letter .com's. Obviously, if the domain doesn't NXDOMAIN, it has been taken.
At the time (before domain squatting was shut down) all legal 4-letter domains were taken.
From the NXDOMAINs, I ran a much slower whois script to see if the domain was registered but missing a DNS entry.
From that final list of unclaimed domains, I was quickly able to spot the one I wanted.
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.)
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.
Search engine auto-correction must be an issue though!
I'd probably pick obscure word combos, that wouldn't naturally occur together. Good fun trying them out in a search engine too.
We have lots of different algorithms, and you can click on one to get just those results.
http://dev.mindfuzz.net/domain/
Edit: Grammar.
Checking if a domain name is registered can be a trick task. The only reliable method is to run a whois; but most hosts only search a fraction of the whois records (perhaps just .com) and also limit your queries. You need to pay money to make mass requests.
I have opted to check for any kind of DNS record. That means registered but unused domains will still return available, but the trade off is that it's very quick, pretty accurate most of the time and most importantly free. :)
the page is pretty, results are fast, and the letter based slots specification is nice.
but i think the results are pretty low quality (gibberish).
Warner Brothers appear to have registered batman[1-9].com, heh.
Yey !
Best (1) currently available (2) 5-letter domain name. I think they did well for these standards.
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.
For speed purposes they should be FIRST running this check on yesterday's zone files from each registry (Verisign for .com/net for example). If that fails (shows in the zone file) no need to go further.
After that check if a name does show as available you do a whois against the appropriate registry NOT a REGISTRAR (because there is no reason to do that).
As step 1 if you don't have access to the zone file you can do a nslookup to see if the domain resolves. If it doesn't you can then check the registry (by the way PIR (.org) rate limits checks unless you are white listed).
Theoretically if a registrar has access to zegup they could front run domains IF the user of zegup indicated which domains they were interested in. Otherwise to many names to be of value in front running the way I see the site operating.
Of course there is nothing to prevent a registrar from putting up a man in the middle site (like zegup) hosted elsewhere and grabbing domains and doing what you are saying. So there is no way to "guarantee" what you are asking other than the reputation of the person running the "zegup" type site.
As an aside zegup.com was registered recently and has domain privacy. So even though whois can be faked privacy info when you are runnning a business is a bad idea.
Domain Name: ZEGUP.COM
Registrant: PrivacyProtect.org Domain Admin (contact@privacyprotect.org) ID#10760, PO Box 16 Note - All Postal Mails Rejected, visit Privacyprotect.org Nobby Beach null,QLD 4218 AU Tel. +45.36946676
Creation Date: 09-Feb-2012 Expiration Date: 09-Feb-2013
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course domains expire or are sold between owners so getting a 4 letter domain is still possible.
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.
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.
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/
this is kind of a tangent but kind of related: you can use a reverse dictionary (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
It's a rather odd constraint given the other options.
bbaaw.com is an invalid domain name
Any ideas on why this is appearing or what it means?
I wonder who designed the algorithm...
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
