Show HN: 51,000 6 character domains | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 51,000 6 character domains

coreyballou.com

128 pointsjqueryin64 comments

For the last few years I've been toying with a variety of techniques for finding available domain names. This is one of my more recent attempts that I thought would be useful to all of you on HN. I created a simple search and alphabetical lookup with pagination to be able to browse through these domains as easily as possible. I built the website search functionality yesterday, so it was quick and dirty (but hopefully the UI is clean enough).

Since the current listing is cached, the only way to tell if a domain is truly still available (and some other HN member hasn't picked it up), you need to click the "Test" button to run a new WHOIS test. If the domain is taken, it'll automatically be removed and you'll be informed. If not, you'll get a nice little success message with both purchase buttons.

I'd love any suggestions. Let us know if you find anything good :)

>Let us know if you find anything good :)

I was surprised saalty.com wasn't taken. It sounds so damn cute. I just bought it on impulse because my heart melts at the drop of a hat for some dumb reason.

Now I have to draw something cute to put there, like a little deer licking a salt cube.

Holding you to this.

That reminds me: I need to do a "salt lick" t-shirt at some point. My condition is a salt wasting condition. People like me supposedly taste saltier than other people. I have joked to friends that when I am well enough to get a sex life again, I should do a quiet little survey and ask a few men if, in fact, I taste saltier than usual. Still toying with how to make the t-shirt not too nasty, on the theory that a kid might want one.

Is there more that can be done for your condition than simply eating a lot of salt?

I've done quite a lot more than simply eat more salt. However, no one really cares. And I'm just a tad more stressed than usual tonight. My health site is listed in my profile if you are curious.

Take care.

I'm already disappointed. I went to saalty.com and there was no deer. Iterate faster! MVP this sucker and get it launched! Get that deer into the cloud! And be sure to count the salt licks with a nosql store.

With a theme like this, at least the OP'll have password storage covered!

Here are some good domains, if any of you are considering a file sharing/locker or search site:

filean.com, fileea.com, filehe.com, fileou.com, findnt.com, findve.com, fineof.com

This is pretty cool. The only suggestions I have are the obvious ones of finding search strings anywhere (not just the beginning), and including more domains (which I'm guessing means adding more bigrams).

Where did you get the list of domains? Does it include all six character ones, or just the ones made of the common bigrams?

The list is based off of about 30 or so high frequency bigrams. Based on people finding this useful, I'm going to go ahead and get a bit more creative in how I generate them to find new combinations.

Of particular interest is finding common 2-char beginnings and endings of words. It wouldn't be hard to implement and scan a dictionary, but if anyone has a direct link to these I'd really want to get these added (or create a separate page just for these).

I appreciate this is not a scalable way to handle requests but I was specifically looking for domains starting in "fl" and you had none. So if you think it's worthwhile, please add it :)

I didn't buy it, but I saw colert.com and thought it sounded like a pretty good company name. Reminds me of alert I'd imagine some kind of website monitoring service perhaps

As I looked through the list, I saw a whoooole lot of potential pharmaceutical company names. Made me laugh.

Love it, thanks. Need to be careful not to register too many domain names.

Could you add the combo 'ap' or even 'app', so we could find a good name for hosting apps?

A random button would be nice, rather than simply alphabetical. Find 5 random 6-letter domain names. Helps with discovery if someone truly has no idea of what they want and are simply looking for inspiration.

Maybe it would be interesting to have a way to sort the result by "score" so that the more "natural" results appear first? (The score should be a combination of the bigram frequencies, maybe the frequency of the full domain name in the bigram model.)

Fun to play with!

One very small point - you might want to change "Courtesty of" to "Courtesy of" (unless it's deliberate).

Hey Corey, Lean Domain Search creator here -- nice site and list.

One thing I'd recommend is to have users click on the results to show them registration options. This gives you the added benefit of being able to automatically double-check that the domain is still available which makes for a much smoother workflow. This would also free up space on your interface which could let you display the results in multiple columns, letting you fit more results on a single page. You can see this in action at Lean Domain Search by searching for a keyword and then clicking one of the available results, ex: http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=jquery

Overall nice start though. Looking forward to seeing other domain name generation algorithm results.

Hey, just thought I'd let you know that the Twitter availability lookup doesn't seem to work correctly. Even for usernames that are available, it's notifying that they are taken.

Thanks -- can you give me an example?

For an example, if you click on the jQuery example query that you posted, one of the search results is "greenjquery.com". When you click on it, it says "@greenjquery" is not available on Twitter, though it's available when you try to register on Twitter.

Good catch! There was a small bug that I just fixed. Appreciate it!

Possible bug: as I'm scrolling down any list, for example http://www.coreyballou.com/six-character-domain-names/L/, and the infinite scroll refreshes at the bottom, I'm seeing many, many dupes – like the list is repeating. Makes the search very frustrating to keep seeing the same words. I'd second the request for a downloadable text list of names if you're feeling generous. :)

cool idea but the design is frustrating.

there's a lot of noise on the page considering all I want to see are the names and they only occupy about 1/16th of the screen currently. would be more easily consumable if you grouped by bigrams and had each row devoted to a given leading bigram.

  hi        fi        ...

    alhico    alfiof

    alhiea    alfiou

    ...

...

if i click on a name, then show the affiliate links.. otherwise they're just wasting space.

given that all the domains you're displaying are the same length, you have a nice constraint to work with in the design and could really use space well.

Thanks for this - any way you'd be willing to post the raw list somewhere? I'd love to search and sort it with some other NLP factors (pronounceability, etc)

Thanks for all of the comments today. I just barely added infinite scroll. I didn't have time to merge it with the pagination functionality, so changing the paginator at the top will reset the infinite scroll (and I'm not yet using HTML5 history and hashing). I'll get around to that in the near future, but this should help you all find things a bit faster.

You know what would make searching easier? Serve the raw ascii list. I know you have affiliate links and all but a list is worth more. In fact, I'll pay you $10 for your list. I'd pay you $15 a month for a raw data feed to your list.

Make a company out of the data you mined, don't make money for a namecheap and godaddy!

Perhaps this is good for trademarkable names that will impress investors.

There are still many names of the form

XY.com

where X and Y are two keywords relevant to your business. Very little is certain in SEO, but I've never met an SEO who didn't believe that keywords in the domain name will help you get traffic from people looking for "X", "Y" and "X Y".

The cost effectiveness of finding a good domain name with keywords is excellent for a "free" name and even fair in some cases if you spend $1k for a domain name. Compare that to the high costs and risks of link building and content creation.

If you know your market well and have a variety of "X" and "Y" keywords, I'd highly suggest checking out http://bustaname.com. The site is fantastic for generating available word combinations.

I also just used leandomain to find the name for a camera search site I'm working on. It gave me wantcamera.com ... sold!

Hypothetically could it be a good investment to buy all of these for $500K/yr?

Horrible investment. You're buying what people haven't picked up in 27 years. If you want to see what happens when people mass buy based on patterns lookup what happened to 4 letter .coms. There was quite a bubble that's been long since burst. I think a lot are available again (the garbage). This would be similar to buying up all the garbage. There could be a few winners but I highly doubt you could make enough money to carry the rest.

I can attest to having previously gone through and purchased some of these. I had que9.com (why9, lol) as well as a-fk.com which I thought was quite clever...

It really just ends up being a waste unless it's easily to both memorize and type. That coupled with a great idea, execution, and marketing, of course :)

Something I just noticed: in your alphabetical list to narrow the results, it skips from E to H, indicating there is nothing with F. If you search for F, though, there are 25 pages of results.

Good find, I must've removed it by accident when I was removing the empty results :) I'll get it back in!

Looks good - I'm also a big fan of http://www.leandomainsearch.com/

Something is wrong with the infinite-scroll paginator. For t domains, it seems to loop or something, after it gets to tec-.

It looks to me like there is nothing beginning with w, x, y, z. Am I not seeing it right?

Nope, that's correct. Those letters do not have high frequency 2-letter combinations compared to the others.

Nice. You should run the domains through domai.nr's "info" API (http://domai.nr/api/docs/json#info-api), so the user doesn't have to manually test by clicking the button.

Thanks for the suggestion :) I'd almost prefer to continue doing the "Test" button since it'll likely only occur on a domain a user is interested in (although bad UX). I'm trying to keep my bandwidth and network IO to a minimum :)

I could, however, change my method of performing a WHOIS check for querying domai.nr instead, since I likely won't hit WHOIS limits that way.

For quick scan lists like this I'd either want to have small result lists above the fold so I can keep pressing 'Next' without scrolling down or huge lists (like leandomainsearch has) where I don't need to press 'Next'.

I second this. It's much easier to be able to just keep hitting next or to just simply scroll forever

I'll look into adding infinite scroll, it makes sense to have. I don't want to limit to something like 10 domains above the fold because it's such a limited set to look at and prev/next adds more barriers to entry for viewing more domains.

Have you seen Domize? How is this better than that? Because it offers browsing instead of just searching?

Domize - http://domize.com/

Site looks cool. Just a heads up, you've got a bit of php "*/?>" showing on your buy now text.

Thanks for the heads up. I've pushed at least 10 times today, cowboy coded the fix... Kids, don't try this at home.

there are no domain names in range of SK - SS. Is this some bug or this bigramms are not popular?

Hey, not sure if you're referring to beginning or ending with SK - SS. I'm only searching based on pattern matching of "TERM%" to ensure I'm hitting the db index. If you're referring to the beginning of a word, it's because I didn't handle the scenario of using the most popular starting 2 characters, just highest frequency characters overall.

The domains could definitely be improved upon if I used the highest frequency 2 letter beginnings as well as the highest frequency 2 letter endings. Instead, the listing is based on matching of the generalized list of highest letter frequencies.

Feel free to ask any more questions!

Scrolled through for a few minutes and found one I had to buy. Domains are addictive.

What's wrong with http://domai.nr ?

Nothing wrong with domai.nr, I actually love it. I also love bustaname. Both of those require you to have some idea of what you're searching for beforehand. This is for those of us who want to browse through a list of possibilities and remove guesswork.

i want to sell htmlc.com - send me an email if you want to buy it :) have owned it for years and years - never used it - was going to be part of my htmlcenter.com site but never got around to it.

Good on you for linking to NameCheap by default.

awesome site - it's so hard to find a good domain name

what about 5 letter.coms

The 5 letter space is a bit more crowded, but I could definitely follow up with that next. I might try running combinations of bigrams and trigrams.

It's a fun exercise. I've tried a lot of similar stuff before (http://www.kevinohashi.com/17/04/2011/other-24000-available-...). The biggest problem I ran into with n-grams was trying to evaluate what was good in an automated way. Using stuff like Norvig's data to try and weight became futile. Stuff like ededed.com would rank exceptionally high if you weight by frequency. That's a bad name. I tried not counting dupes, giving dupes decreasing value as they increased, etc. Nothing really produced results that weighted nicely when I looked at them. This strategy did find the crap names at the bottom though. The problem was the 75% or so that was left was mixed.

I am curious if you tried to algorithmically sort the lists by any sort of nice/value/brand factor?

It'd be a fun exercise to weight the domains. I've personally considered (but haven't gone through with) trying to implement a metaphone or soundex algorithm to determine if the resulting words "sounded" English based on comparison with dictionary data phonemes. Phonemes in general are the reason I decided to go with combinations of high frequency digrams and trigrams.

It's rather infuriating (from experience) :) If you do go about it and want to discuss it more I'd be happy to.

Just a heads up. I'm currently running through a list of 32,488 possible 5-char combinations using a combination of high frequency bigrams, trigrams, and high frequency beginning and ending letters. When I'm done and get a new DB table I'll put up a new link for you :-P

It'll take a number of hours to complete (ew), but I'll post something when I can. I'm actually off on vacation to get married tomorrow morning, so if it doesn't finish before 5 today I won't have it up for over a week...

Looking forward to it! Congrats on your wedding.

Thanks and congrats on your wedding :)

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