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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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