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Instant Domain Search

instantdomainsearch.com

42 pointsacqbu32 comments

Hi! I'm the CEO of Instant Domain Search. I originally built it in 2005 after attending YC's first Startup School, and have maintained it as a side project since then. AMA!

How is this different from literally dozens of other sites that do exactly the same thing?

Do a whois search, maybe cache the results a bit. Have affiliate agreements with some vendors. And scrape domain squatter prices.

Even a lot of registrars do this.

TLD-list (among others) does everything you do, better.

None of those sites existed when I first built this 17 years ago. WHOIS, even behind a cache, would not support our query volume. We focus on being really fast. Any specific features you'd like to see?

I’m on mobile. Any way to return only “available” results? Eg only results where you can click buy and pay a normal registration price? (And not like $100 to $1M)

Filters are on the TODO, thanks!

Honestly, you don't want to query a third party database. If you have a really good idea for a domain name, its already taken. OK, I'll retry: if you have a really good idea for a domain name, you don't want to share it with a third party. You only want to query the database(s) directly, and even then you want to select which ones. Why? Discretion. Say you want to start a new company. You look if the name you came up with is available. You verify it isn't, and hey presto a few days later it got domain squatted.

Why don't you just buy it straight away? Problem solved!

(Nobody ever thought of that!)

Because 1) you don't expect this to happen (confidentiality) 2) you're still setting up your company/idea which requires other administrative tasks which require time.

They want you to impulsively buy a domain out of fear of it getting hijacked.

I still don't see why not, it takes a few clicks and costs a few dollars. It seems that if you are a person that expects this to happen then it's a good strategy.

Otherwise you just decide which domain search you trust and hope your domain remains available.

Been a happy customer since 2005! Your profile says "W22" next to the company name, is that a reference to a YC batch? What are your plans for the site?

Tangent: You know How everybody has to keep explaining "web3" over and over again? Twitter threads, deep dives, YT explainers, etc? Nobody had to spend much time explaining "web 2.0". You just saw Google Maps after MapQuest or InstantDomainSearch after whatever else was there, and you instantly got it.

Shh, we are only two weeks into W22: https://instantdomains.com/

I'm a long time happy user. The site is fast, simple, and always seemed trustworthy in a market with seedy actors. You've helped me name multiple projects and companies - thank you!

Thank you!

I concur - it's really snappy and a great place to start if you're looking for a domain. Although it's not 100% accurate, I understand the technical limitations and frankly, I can't think of a better alternative.

I could be wrong about this but I believe you wrote a nice long article explaining how the search works and how you're able to search millions of rows instantly. Had some diagrams as well. It was quite an interesting read that I still have some faint recollection to this day. Can't seem to find that link anymore. Would you mind sharing it with us?

P.s. sorry if I'm totally wrong about this could be from some other site for all I remember now

It’s possible you read it on our site. We have some recent (and some very old) articles about how the magic happens, like this one about our open source word segmenter: https://instantdomainsearch.com/engineering/instant-word-seg...

So no domain squatting in response to a first phase of search here?

No, that'd be bad for business.

What do you think needs to happen to make personal domains easy enough for the average person to buy and use, to increase data ownership?

Most registrars expose people to way too much complexity. The Internet is the original social network, but no one has made it easy to use. I think there is a lot of opportunity here.

I agree. What do you think of my approach here?

https://takingnames.io/blog/introducing-takingnames-io

Some results for .hr are shown as available to buy while in reality are occupied, e.g. Story.hr

When it says WHOIS next to a result, I was expecting clicking it to take me to the WHOIS record but it instead it just takes me to an anrdoezrs.net page that won't load. That aside, the page load speed is very impressive.

They are sent through an affiliate link to Go Daddy. We hope to answer these queries ourselves -- soon.

Heads up.. it doesn't seem to work so well for emoji domains. But then 99.9% of domain search sites don't like emoji domains...

Otherwise, it's great :)

Unfortunately, emoji domains are just not that well-supported at many registries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain

It doesn't work. Try looking for a simple word and the country code domain below say buy. Clicking buy turns into a 125 fee for godaddy to try and buy the domain

That sounds like Go Daddy's annual price for .ai domains.

I keep getting “buy” and going to the site but finding it’s not available. Interesting attempt tho.

This should not happen for .com names (where we do a live "double check"), but can happen with others. We build our index based on zone files and DNS, so if a name is not configured, it will show as available.

I had it happen for lots of .page, .dev, etc. Really cool utility though. :)

Making this perfect is on the TODO, thanks!

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