Need a name for your startup? I wrote a domain name generator in Node.JS | Hacker News Reader

Need a name for your startup? I wrote a domain name generator in Node.JS

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153 pointschaosmachine61 comments

We changed the URL from http://impossibility.org/, which currently points to a porn site.

This is my first project written in Node.JS. Really cool platform. I'd be happy to answer any questions about the implementation.

How are you looking up domain names?

DNS first, if there's no DNS record, I do a whois query. The work is spread over a pool of 6 servers, which run the lookups in parallel.

Is this within the TOU for whois queries?

If you want to keep the queries mostly in-house, you can get access to Verisign's copy of the .com zone file for free and download it once a day.

http://www.verisign.com/domain-name-services/domain-informat...

And if you don't even want to change your code, you could fire up a DNS server that serves the entries from that file.

that's really clever, using DNS as a first-level filter and only going out to whois if that comes up blank.

Great product. Hope you make a tonne of cash! :)

What DNS record type are you looking up? If it's A rather than NS, you might want to rethink... NS will return responses when A might not.

Where are you hosting this and what type of memory usage are you getting? Thanks, neat site!

Node is currently using 32MB, server load is at 0.09, on a Linode 512.

Searches served since posting here 5 hours ago: 21,000 :)

You sir, are a rockstar!

Maybe add a few more algorithms in the future, but you should get decent referral fees with this.

This is really great. Congrats. I was just thinking that I wanted help naming my next startup idea.

what material did you find the most helpful for learning node.js?

How do you store the words? In memory or do you use something like redis, mysql?

Let me add my voice to the chorus: great job! This is the best domain name generator site I've seen yet.

I've tried quite a few of these, yours is nicely done. I was surprised at some of the beautiful domain names it generated. Now I just have to control my urge to register even more domain names I'll never actually complete the project for...

Thanks, just registered LazySchedule.com for a new service I'm providing for my fellow classmates at PSU.

This IS nice. I tried it and does come up with good suggestions. A tool which think does a little better on the semantics side is http://nameboy.com. Their problem is that names proposed are often not available (despite) their status at nameboy.com. Your tool seems to avoid that problem somehow. The way you figured out to get your availability info in parallel and with DNS checks first seems very elegant.

I know this market well. if you want more ideas and suggestions for better name generation logic and dictionaries, give me a shout (rastaquere AATT gmail DOTT com). maybe we can work on something together.

I totally love this! I had a lot of fun finding domain names. I'm surprised at how good the names are :)

I see one obvious potential for improvement. My word was 'treatise' and I asked for prefixes, and I got things like:

hurttreatise.com

but that's not a very good domain name because it's ambiguous when spoken whether both words are fully spelled. I think you should be avoiding duplicate letters at word boundaries.

This is already off to a great start, but amassing pieces of simple logic like this will make it unstoppable.

I like this a lot. For my current needs, I think this gives the best results of all the tools out there I've tried. I do occasionally get duplicates in the same set of results, but other than that this rocks!

Can you create a secret option to list all available domains at once?

I'm impressed by the quality of the results.

I don't know why you've made it rely on javascript though. It would have been so easy to make it degrade gracefully... Surely no more than half an hours work?

I see this complaint a lot, and agree it is not hard to provide basic functionality without JavaScript. However, I'd be interested to know where in life the JavaScript is lacking. The only place I have ever encountered a lack of JavaScript was the browser on the Nintendo Wii (I was shocked and amazed).

I've personally been hit by XSS on Twitter. Millions of other people have been hit by XSS flaws too. The Internet's mostly composed of poorly written websites lacking basic security, so I'm no longer comfortable having JS turned on globally. I disable it and enable it temporarily on a per website basis. Fortunately, the vast majority of websites don't need it to be enabled for them to work. It's just a bit annoying when you come across a website that has no real requirement for JS but wont work without it, so you have to enable it.

XSS is a non issue here. There is no user data on this website.

That's not really an argument against my policy of globally disabling JS though is it. I have enabled it for this website, but it shouldn't have been necessary.

Besides, who knows what might happen to the website in future? He might add some premium services and require a login?

The important question is this though, how well does this website work with screen readers? I'm guessing blind people are out of look here, but I know there are a few blind people who hang around here so I'm hoping one of them gives it a try and reports back.

it's only a half hour worth of work now

but it's a maintenance headache down the road, I'm sure.

I don't see how... The website is a page with a form. Not a webmail client or a forum...

I know that I'm in the minority, but I hoped that your site worked with scripting turned off.

> This is one of those crazy web2.0 things, so you'll need to enable javascript. Sorry

Why? How would that even work?

I find this a very strange question. It would work the same way most other websites work...

You'd enter a domain into a form, hit the submit button, a new page would load with the results.

It would look slightly less fancy because all the results would return at once and there would be no animation.

However, you'd then add some javascript to the page to overload the submit button and make it use js to retrieve the results to get the current effect. So most users would have the fancy bits instead.

But then the page would load slowly... and be dependent on the performance of the remote server.

Let's say if he decides to query a bunch of servers to check out uncommon tlds, then his site would have to wait for the slowest link.

Hence why this would be a graceful degradation and not the primary interface. You could then change the warning text from:

"This is one of those crazy web2.0 things, so you'll need to enable javascript. Sorry."

To:

"We cater for non JavaScript users, but results will be returned much more quickly if you enable JavaScript"

A much more friendly message.

Was I the only one who seriously expected a generator that appended "-ify" to the end of the word?

I do like this, though. I'll be using it in the future. Good job.

First of all, fantastic job. Really love how fast this is.

As a user, I think "Don't like any of these? Search again, you'll get something different!" could be replaced with a great button: "Show More" or "Show Next Cycle" or something like that. It'd be much easier to find instead of looking for that text link at the bottom.

You forgot to set a Content-Type header.

Very cool, good brainstorming tool.

Great tool, have been using it extensively today. Thank you for sharing!

Fantastic - I actually just found a name for a project using it!

This one is awesome, I just used it to buy a domain! Good job!

This is pretty nice, thank you. Could you share how you look up the domains? Usually I just go to a registrar and type stuff in.

One easy way: On a Linux box you can type:

whois domainIAmInterestedIn.com

Great work, thank you. Can you list the availability of the original domain (example.com) as well?

Interesting, but tons of competition in this space... Google "domain name generators"

Ha! I don't want it, but techimps.com is hilarious. Oh geez, textmama.com.

Can you please support other TLD's than .com?

Nice!

But since good .coms are taken, allow me to choose the tld like .me .ly .at .co for better results

I bet the same search for .me domains would give even four or five letter domains available.

Is the name generation simply list based?

Essentially. I went through a dictionary dump of every word with 4 letters or less, got rid of the crappy/obscure words, and then split them up into lists of nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

My goal was to automate my own technique for finding good domains: Pick a keyword, and try to come up with a short modifier that isn't taken yet.

You might consider filtering out a few of the more sexual nouns.

I'm not saying frogorgy.com wouldn't be a big hit, but it's a bit niche.

Please don't censor needlessly.

yeah.... the second and third thing I searched for were sex and porn :)

Awesome! Can you please add other TLD's?

great tool - but it seems to be returning your raw source code right now vs. delivering the index

it took me a few minutes to realize i can get different results each time i click the button.

RubyHulk.com is available! :O

meowsex.com is available!

On a more serious note, I just registered trynode.com. Great app.

Very impressed the the quality of the results. Excellent work.

Where are the results? Please post successful name finds if there are any. I'm calling foul. I've written a few months ago that domain name generators are dead.

http://www.dotsauce.com/2010/09/07/domain-finder-tools-do-no...

I will admit your app functions well and has good intentions. But, the vast majority of good word combinations have been claimed already.

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