Find a Great Domain Name (Beta code is YCOMBINATOR) | Hacker News Reader

Find a Great Domain Name (Beta code is YCOMBINATOR)

domainhole.com

34 pointsbradpineau32 comments

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Its funny cause, domainhole is a terrible name

I quite like the name to be honest.

And I sure like the design as well.

me too

I too quite liked the name. It incites a strong reaction, which is good...Guess one either likes it or hates it.

You should see some of my project names. I think I had to change a few of them before I started interviewing for a new job.

instant check

First of all, it's limited to only .com's. That seems silly. I think I'm in the fairly normal group of people who would want to check at least org and net too, if not io, pl, and all the other random strange domains. The instant check service does not seem unique and seems more limited than even the most basic domain checker.

name spinner

This idea is boring. Given a name already either prepend or append a word that falls into a given "group" and check for it's availability in a single TLD. This time that TLD is at least selectable.

expired domain search

Given a few words locate domains for which that is a substring of if they have recently expired or are in pending delete. I don't see how this is particularly useful, you're finding domains that may or may not be able to be bought in the near future (registrars can still take back a domain that is in pendingDelete status for a few to ICANN).

From my perspective this is fun from a "hey, I wonder what people use this substring and don't pay their bill" game, but not really for finding a domain name unless I happen to be inspired by one of the domains and check under a different TLD.

Overall

I think the approach that is being taken here is not original and has been done hundreds of times. I have a hard time naming things and have looked repeatedly for a "Name this thing for me!" service. This is another disappointment.

I do think that this is a problem domain that has yet to be solved and that a good solution would make a decent company. I don't think this service at this point comes close to even beginning to solve the problem.

The expired domain search becomes valuable when you put in "2" into the "number of words" input. Now you're getting nice keyword rich 2 word domains. If you're searching for domains that haven't expired yet, you're best bet is to backorder it, and hope to grab it first. We'll add other TLDs for the instant domain check.

caveat: I created a similar site called domainjig.com, so take these as friendly suggestions.

The expired domain search is cool, well done with this tool.

Make it faster. Right now, loading the page to search for availability is taking longer than 10 seconds. When searching using the different tools, the response comes back after a few seconds delay. If you're comfortable discussing it, what are the major components of the backend? Is your data stored in RAM? Can you make the availability check instant?

eg. the expired domain search for "rabbit" over the last 30 days took a few minutes to return 2 pages of results. maybe the traffic referred from this post on HN is finding some bottlenecks for you?

The name spinner came up with some interesting suggestions. I'd suggest removing or hiding some of the advanced options, in favor of simplifying the default interface.

Hope that helps.

I really like it. Especially that with each suggestion it tells you whether or not it is available.

The hardest thing I had with the site was when there were a lot of suggestions I had a lot of trouble reading through all of them, kind of like the words all ended up running together. It might just be me though.

My wife has been looking for a domain name for a while now, and we've already found a couple possibilities because of this.

As a future feature suggestion for the domain spinner -- At some point it would be really cool if you could find a way to choose a domain name that you kind of like, choose it and only show ones that are similar to it. This would be especially good when combining with adjectives. Some may be looking for more cheerful or positive adjectives while others may be looking for powerful or possibly negative ones.

Awesome comments and thanks to all for the suggestions. We've got an awesome list and we'll start implementing.

Apologies for the slow expired domain search. The server is getting NAILED and we're obviously not equipped to handle the scale yet. I'll use the excuse: Hey - we're in Beta!

So we're working on the scale issue as we speak. Hope to have instant searches back ASAP.

For those who asked - site is built on the LAMP stack.

Really fun site. I think it is helpful. I did, however, think the list that was returned was too long by default. Maybe leave off the unavailable one?

My comment applies to the Name Spinner.

You should be able to just edit your parent comment (for awhile longer at least).

If you've got all the data stored off up-front, the search should be near-instant. As-is, it's nearly unusably slow.

However, if the delay is caused by hitting the network for each search result on the backend (or something along those lines), maybe it would be nice to quickly return an initial barebones dataset and then the browser could do an async fetch of each record's details.

Nice site!

What surprised me was how many domains were taken that didn't have names I'd consider worthwhile... Weird.

A "First Week of Testing Update" has been posted to the homepage - we've addressed some issues users have had. Check it out - http://www.domainhole.com/

It seems like you arent normalising all strings to lowercase which has a huge impact on available results in the name spinner. If PitbullHelp.com is unavailable pitbullhelp.com shouldnt be as well.

This is a great app. I have a similar site that is more curated but less searchable: http://www.scoratic.com

What are you built on?

I like it, overall, but it would be much more useful if I could click to add domains to a "maybe list" while I try a few different things to find what I want.

On the expired domain search, you can "star" a domain to look at it later. We'll add that starring option to the other tools ASAP.

Nifty :)

It is going quite slow for me. All three tools.

Usually ajaxwhois.com and instantdomainsearch.com are completely instantaneous when I use those tools.

Slow as in I didn't wait around to see the results, like >1 minute.

Name spinner returned a huge list of available names with a suffix appended to my seed, but then that list was repeated as unavailable beneath it.

Best use of the expired search tool: put "2" in the "number of words" input, and you'll find some great 2 word keyword specific domains

A little suggestiong: make the fonts bigger.

I have to zoom in to 144% (in Chrome) to make it readable.

It would be neat if it could also filter or score domains based on how pronounceable they are.

We have a pronouncable checkbox/score coming next week!

skinnycoders.com, uptightcoders.com and uglycoders.com are taken.

fatcoders.com, pleasantcoders.com and handsomecoders.com are free.

You know what to do.

A new tool is available - a web 2.0 name generator.

You can use beta code: YCOMBINATOR

Great site. It already helped me find a name for my project.

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