Ask HN: Review my app: Search expired/available short domain names | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my app: Search expired/available short domain names

scoretool.appspot.com

104 pointsjcrocholl59 comments

I like the idea but the source whois data seems quite inaccurate.

It said that digit.com and 6af.com were both free (which I obviously jumped on) but turns out they are actually registered and not due to expire for some time.

I understand that's annoying, and hope to improve it. The system reports digit.com free because it doesn't have an A record, but I will fix this by checking SOA records in the future. I'm not sure why 6af.com is reported free, maybe there was a temporary DNS problem when I checked it. It should be updated in a couple of days.

You could first try the ANY query (which won't return all records though) and then a whois query on failed ones to be sure. Combined with some smart caching and affiliate/click tracking (to see if a new domain gets registered).

Why are you doing DNS queries to determine if something is free? You can find registrars with APIs you can ping and check availability.

This is very cool. TheMargarine.com is available--startup millions, here I come!

Edit: Seriously, great work. Have bookmarked and will be back for my next domain search.

Wow, this is very cool and elegant. I really like how the UI is simplistic and functional. Thank you for making it open source too.

One small idea might be to add slider bars to adjust the weights. That way, one can drag these sliders and see the rankings update on the fly. Maybe these bars (vertical?) can be displayed next to the textbox when user clicks in the textbox. Or maybe you can place the bars (horizontal) in the right column where you currently have feedback.

Additional cool features might be the ability to "watch"/receive notifications for new domain names that satisfy specified weights. Maybe automatically tweet the user or implement it as an RSS feed.

Great tool. I have one minor criticism - the domain availability seems to be just inaccurate enough to be annoying. The first few domains that caught my eye appeared to be free but were actually taken.

Somewhat off the main topic: I really like the feedback form, very elegant and to the point. I think Dropbox does something similar for their feedback. I might try something like that in my app.

Went back and looked at the page. I agree, its very elegant and to the point. Good job!

Very cool, as someone who has been searching for domains recently I can really appreciate the functionality.

As for feedback, I think having the text boxes at the top for weighting treated graphically might be better. Either some up/down or +/- icons to just tweak those might be cool. (maybe an ajaxy slider that pops up?)

But otherwise dig the concept. +1

Seems to be missing some short names --- for instance, while diiq.com and diiq.org are owned, diiq.net is unclaimed --- but 'diiq' does not appear at all, despite being four characters long. What qualifies a domain name to appear in your list?

My list is a fairly random sampling of the huge search space of available domain names. I'm planning to keep adding more names in the future, trying to strike a balance between good names (short but readable) and more names (requiring more storage). Fortunately, the App Engine Datastore has linear complexity for the number of query results, so adding more names doesn't slow down the searching.

i'm surprised that you don't dynamically extend your database if you have a miss. did you try that? if so, i'm curious why it didn't work out.

Because we can't run DNS queries inside Google App Engine. Instead, I query the DNS results from my home computer and feed them into the datastore using remote_api.

ah, ok (thanks). did you see the recent post here about someone exposing dns over http? although i have no idea if you could call that either...

Is there a way to sort out domains with numbers + hyphens in them? I imagine most people are most concerned with llll.com domains.

Yes, you can enter very negative weights in the input boxes for digits (numbers) and dashes (hyphens). Then these domains will be sorted down to the end of the list (below the end of the page).

This is fantastic. Otherwise I use freshdrop.net, but this is surfacing good domains more quickly. Well executed.

I use freshdrop.net too. There are a lot of domain names on there so here's a good filter:

  * exclude all but .com
  * exclude hyphens and numbers
  * set char limit to 12
  * click "Geo" at the top of the page

results right now: tipolo.com, treeville.com, umoru.com, etc

Very cool. Two thoughts:

1) I wouldn't call the numbers you enter into the boxes "scores." They are really weights - I don't know about others but I got confused by that at first.

2) Is there a way to substring searches? E.g. If I type in "debate" I might want "mydebate" to come up...

Thank you all for the great feedback!

1) You're right, but the boxes (and columns of numbers) are probably going to disappear in the next version. Maybe we'll have sliders or radio buttons to adjust between "Important" and "Don't care" for some properties.

2) Real substring searches are not supported because they are expensive. But your example is supported: type "debate" in the second keyword input field for suffix matches.

Another useful tool along these lines is http://domai.nr/, which searches all the available TLDs, not just the big 5. However, it expects you to have a full word in mind rather than suggesting things.

I like it a lot; however, it seems that if I type, my name, for example (my actual name) it doesn't check it. It seems like there is a very limited list of domains? Although I like it so far.

The scoring mechanism is weird, and not quite intuitive. However, I played around with it for a few min and it started to make /some/ sense.

Overall, very useful for finding short names.

Why does it say magic.com is free? Or am I doing it wrong?

Because magic.com doesn't have an A record. If you click on the "free" link, the registrar (moniker.com for now) will tell you that it's taken. I know this is disappointing, but I haven't found a good way to do bulk whois for millions of names, DNS is much easier.

How about doing a DNS lookup but for a SOA record type, instead of an A record? I'm fairly sure that will either give you a record or an NXDOMAIN.

  $ dig magic.com SOA
  [snip]
  magic.com.              21600   IN      SOA     auth03.ns.uu.net. hostmaster.uu.net. 990605 21600 3600 1728000 21600

That sounds good, I'll look into it.

Ya, I got excited and tried to buy magic.com too :(

use different colors for .com, .net, etc columns.

if it is free, use the black text "free". if it is taken, grey out that cell, with no text.

that will make it much easier to scan with the eye

You need better moderation of the suggestion feature along the right. I doubt you want it saying random garble and things like "gay hot lesbians."

You're right. At some point I'm going to start using http://getsatisfaction.com/ or think about moderation/filtering. But for now I really like the direct feedback from users, so I'm going to delete bogus entries manually from time to time.

That makes sense. In the meantime it must be frustrating that there are so many irresponsible people who make more work for you.

Was going to suggest a feedback/comment section but I see you already have it. An excellent way of getting responses from the end user.

I really like it... it would be great, as I'm sure you know, to tie in registration.

On that note, who is everyone using for registration these days?

gandi.net is a French registrar that I use.

Gandi are by far the best registrar I've ever used. 100% control, 100% decent support and 100% uptime on their free DNS. Couldn't ask for better.

just moved everything from godaddy to namecheap. It was a good bit of work, but glad to have finished it.

I did the same about a year ago and overall I'm quite pleased. After a year they're bugging me to renew whois-cloaking thing on namecheap, but orders of magnitude less irritating than godaddy in all sorts of ways.

name.com is really good. free private whois, and the interface is really great compared to something like godaddy. they do exactly what i want them to do and nothing more.

Satisfied moniker.com customer here.

Very cool. What is the backend written in?

it's hosted in appspot, so it should be python (unless Google supported other languages)

Google now supports both Python and Java on App Engine, but you're right it's Python.

And via the Java JVM it's possible to run other languages as well: I have seen PHP, and think there's a ruby version...

It's written in about 2500 lines of Python, using Django 1.1 (app-engine-patch) on Google App Engine. Full source code is here: http://github.com/jcrocholl/scoretool

Out of curiosity, why did you settle on app-engine-patch rather than use_library()?

Because app-engine-patch includes more than just a zipped package of Django 1.1. It comes with jQuery, the Blueprint CSS framework, a media generator to join and minify your CSS and JavaScript, automatic URLs for each app (using urlsauto.py), and helper functions like ragendja.template.render_to_response and ragendja.dbutils.get_object_or_404.

Got it. I just wondered if there were standard-Django features you wanted to use, but couldn't (easily) without AEP. It sounds, however, like it was all the other in-package goodies that made AEP desirable.

If there were a "GAE django starter project" that included jQuery etc. but made use of use_library(), would that be interesting?

Yes, that would be interesting because the startup time for loading the zipped Django 1.1 package is significant. Maybe app-engine-patch can be tweaked to use_library()?

If you can make it work that would be cool. Currently there are too many reported free that are actually taken.

Very nice. I would like to be able to see more results at once.

This is very interesting. Where are you sourcing the data from?

Some of the names are made up (combinations of letters or short dictionary words). The expired names are from http://namejet.com/Pages/Downloads.aspx and I'm planning to keep adding more names in the future.

awesome! just bought beltoo.com from it. thanks :)

Congratulations to our first customer! Since my post on HN we had 612 hits on moniker.com, with 1 conversion for $0.31 commission. I also spent $1.60 today for 22.43 CPU hours on Google App Engine. Almost all of the 17k requests today were AJAX queries for domain searches.

It looks like you're $1.29 in the hole then.

I logged on to see what your application was like, and ended up buying a two-syllable, two word com and .co.uk domain (not sure how long the registration process takes) that would be a good project name.

So, yeah, I think your project is great. A couple of things:

* Hire a graphic designer

* Your affiliate hosting company wanted me to enter a US state when paying with my credit card. I entered Armed Forces overseas, it still went through, but it wa annoying

Just played around with it. Nice work.

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