Show HN: Domain Wheel – Domain and company name generator | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Domain Wheel – Domain and company name generator

domainwheel.com

23 pointsmaldinii22 comments

We have started the project during a hackaton here at Themeisle and just managed to launch a beta version for it.

While before I was wondering why there aren't any good tools for this, soon I realise that is much more complex than I thought, for now we are using various existing APIs from Godaddy,DomainsBot and DataMuse with custom rules, exclusions and suggestions to make sure we deliver much better results.

It seems that the only good solution for now and something we are working on is to integrate MTurk or microworkers and generate suggestions "on-the-fly", while building a nice database of data, I am passionated about ways that we can build a smart searh/suggestion engine "backed" by humans, will see how much it makes sense.

I've used a lot this kind of services for giving me inspiration. I have to admit that I'm a bit disappointed with this one, it feels... uninspired. For the example I tried it just appended unrelated words like "home" or "lunch" to my keywords.

My personal favorite is http://www.panabee.com as it plays with the phonetic of your keywords. It gives a lot of weird things but usually one or two are catchy names.

Anyway, congratulation to OP for shipping something!

hey! Thanks for the honest feedback, we are trying to play with phoenetic and just show some keywords and not domains, we'll look into it :)

Yeah, it interprets "functional" in "functional programming" using the more general definition of just being, basically, not broken. Which, I get it, it's fine. I'm a bit disappointed in the narrowness of the returned results, but I also don't expect it to just know my intent, either.

The site you linked gave me an amusing one that's really simple: unctionalprogramming. Reminds me of the word "unctuous."

guessing intent it proven to be really complex topic, we can definetively ask questions and get user feedback to tweak the results once we have more data.

Here's something I wrote just for this purpose a number of years ago. Yes, a CGI script, in BASH no less, producing an endless stream of domain names for your startup.

https://gist.github.com/Yetangitu/83fc77acf3d381a32c40a8f89f...

It even tells you whether the generated names are still available in .com, .net and .info, feel free to add even more specious extensions here.

Running it with a good-sized list of adjectives creates... well, just about the same nonsensical drivel as that which seems to be produced by many other similar tools. This one is free though...

   EssentialDuck
   AssuredPig
   BelovedFrog
   ProfitableMonkey
   FrontLizard
   ColorfulGator
   InfiniteDuck

(what? No ...Fish names yet?)

   GrandFox

(sorry, taken for .net and .com)

   VivaciousPig
   FunctionalPig

(for all you Haskell hogs out there)

   SuperiorMonkey
   RegularMonkey

(taken!)

   IllHippo
   StarryHound
   DiligentGator
   IncomparableDonkey

...

Well, you get the drill. It is interesting to note that the list of taken domains seems to be smaller these days compared to when I made this thing, back in the heady days of dot.com.boom. Maybe folks have wizened up to the fact that all those nonsensical names started to look stale fresh out of the wrapper?

Thanks for the tip, will check this out!

I entered "fancy pants" the initial block was all decent stuff you'd expect, and the response was quick. Yay.

The "Check some carefully handpicked domains for you" section included Dogban.com, Guppyra.com, Cruzani.com and other completely unrelated or ridiculous things, which made my brain say "bullshit" "handpicked my ass" I would kill that section because it's a) totally useless to me and b) makes you look like liars because it is not "handpicked domains for you" it's... I dunno random crap you thought was neat? i dunno, but unless i was selling "no dogs allowed" signs (Dogban.com) everything there is just... ugh.

Hey! Thanks for feedback, we saw indeed that engagement isn't that great with the section and I didn't thought about the "handpicked" stuff. We started with some pretty much random generic domains there and are looking to build a database of handpicked stuff :)

I'm going to register vivongm.com and kuehoral.com for my new startup about guttural choking noises!

Looks good and suggestions are good. A little OT but what is your opinion on using the new TLDs like .win, .rocks, etc? Does that sound professional?

I chose to exclude those on purpose, I am not sure if people are that much interested in them, considering especially that some are quite expensive. I think however that some short ones like .win .rocks can be allowed.

Particularly, I don't mind using such domains, we started for e.g revive.social and I don't see any problem with it

Should probably let the user decide, and you get an extra word thats not just .com.

I was hoping this would identify TLDs that fit into the company name. Like a company named "Untame" with website of "unta.me"

is doing this sometimes, I think we need to tweak it a bit. Thanks!

Broken on mobile. Tried a single word and it displayed a blank block of text.

is not mobile, but I noticed indeed a but when there are no results for a particular keyword.

Is there an open way of accessing domain availability information?

not really, we are automatically showing only avaialable domains ( checking this against an API before displaying the results)

might want to let people register and save their favorite domain register. I use godaddy so it wouldn't apply to me but, something to think about.

good point, I thought that people tend to buy right away, however you might be right, it worth at least experimenting with a favourite function, probably can be done without requiring an account neither.

I was thinking it might be "reason" to collect their information for future updates.

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