Show HN: Available Five Character Alpha Domains | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Available Five Character Alpha Domains

coreyballou.com

63 pointsjqueryin42 comments

Perfect timing! This is will be great for my $1 NameCheap coupon... https://www.namecheap.com/deals/30000-retweets-0.98-domains-...

BAM! That is a steal. Thanks for sharing :)

I just got a 5 letter domain for $1.16 because of this thread and your comment.

This is a great tool! I was also able to get in on the .98 domain deal.

As promised in my previous weeks submission "Show HN: 51,000 6 character domains" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4207783), here's a listing 10,750 available 5 letter domain names I found via combinations of high frequency digrams, trigrams, and beginning and ending letters.

I simplified the process and removed the buy buttons to unclutter the view. They are now baked into the "Check Availability" button. The site also uses infinite scrolling, but there are likely to be a few kinks if no new info is found since I put up a MVP of the infinite scroller.

Is there any way to search within the list, e.g. search for abc within the 10000 results?

Whoops, it was still using the six-char search. If that's what you're referring to, it's been resolved.

Interesting to see how many 5 chars are available. But a godaddy referal? Really?

I find referrals scummy when somebody is presenting a recommendation because you don't know if they're just interested in the reward or not. That's not what this is though. It's a tool to find domains, and whether there is a referral code or not doesn't change the validity of that domain name. It's just some payback to the dev for providing a free service.

Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding why you are against referral codes in tools like this.

Hey might be referring to the fact that people don't like GoDaddy very much given the recent bashings and mass exodus to NameCheap :)

"Bashing" implies injustice.

Because of their supporting/co-sponsoring SOPA. I’m not expressing an opinion here, it’s just probably what sturob is referring to.

Or their CEO killing elephants, or their sexist advertising. Yeah, I guess there’s plenty to choose from from the hate jar, even if you think they were punished enough for SOPA.

Nobody force you to register with GoDaddy, and knowing this facts, you shouldn't.

But this still does not change the fact that IF GD gives the biggest $ for referrals, then that make sense for OP to integrate it, especially since he is not charging anything for this service and he made it on his spare time -- so I don't see the problem with this.

There’s always more to consider than just $/referral. For example blinking, pop-up ads might be more lucrative in the short term, but in the long term could turn to be too annoying, and end up putting off some users. The choice of monetization opportunities says a lot about the character and priorities a company has.

Like I said, I don’t want to take sides and start a flame war here, but it’s a fact that dealing with GoDaddy is controversial, and no company operates in void — your choice of registrar or ad network has certain implications, that ought to be considered.

It's not the referral. I'm pretty sure that's understood, accepted, and in many cases like this, encouraged.

The issue is who the referral is with: GoDaddy.

How else would he use hacker news to spam

Why link to godaddy when there are tons of respectable choices?

GD probably has higher affiliate kickbacks.

These are fun, and it's interesting to see solid domains still in there. destn.com (standard abbreviation for Destination on tickets, or close to destin, French for destiny) was there. IOUit.com, OnOft.com...

Some neat ones I didn't pick up: erleo.com ofury.com ionur.com vengd.com and atond.com reoff.com ennds.com phaar.com ioran.com

This is addictive, though... Closing it now!

Thanks! I just snagged STLDO.com -- I have an idea for a St. Louis events website!

St Louis DO!

There is no St. Louis TRY!

(Yeah, feel free to steal that as the site's tagline)

I'm thinking a Yoda mascot in front of the arch for the logo.

My initial reading was St. Dildo :/

Apparently you can't read.

Back in the late 1990s, I wrote a perl script that whois'd every "$word.com" in /usr/share/dict/words. At the time, I thought, "gee, all the good names are taken" and registered none of them. I kick myself now. <:)

It seems to repeat the last page ad infinitum. E.g. I’m on “V”, and once you scroll down past “veury.com” it just repeats from “veour.com.” I was also hoping to browse “vec∗” domain names, and they seem to be missing from the index entirely.

I'll take a gander :) The infinite scroll code is pretty minimal, so there's likely to be more holes than that :-P

I think the actual problem is that umping to a specific letter breaks the infinite scroll. Jumped to 'S' looking for some relevant domains for a side project but it keeps looping through maybe 50 or so domains. Is it looping through all of the 'S' domains it knows or is it just broken? If it's the first then it'd be better to end the infinite scroll if it reaches the end of all options for the specific letter I selected from top menu.

So I hadn't thought much about it, but I had a TODO still in my JS file where I needed to update the "Next" pagination link to point to the next page (incremental). I fixed this, so we should be set. I also added a bunch of failsafes, but wouldn't doubt if there's an edge case. Once you start using infinite scroll, it messes with the paginator a bit so it's only useful beyond the current page you're on. I didn't want to write a full blown plugin, so it's a bit hacky :)

Is there any way you could make the search match the end of the domain instead of the start? There are a few words I'd like to experiment with where I'd quite like to have a "branding" letter (or letters!) at the front :)

I'm working on adding this now. For those of you interested, I'm creating a reverse index on the name portion of the domains:

    ALTER TABLE domains ADD rev varchar(10) default null;
    UPDATE domains SET rev = REVERSE(REPLACE(name, '.com', ''));
    ALTER TABLE domains ADD INDEX `rev_idx` using btree (rev);

All set :)

You should now see a dropdown for selecting beginning or ending in the search form.

Awesome stuff, that's great, thanks! :)

I feel like I'm missing something... What's the value of a 5 letter domain over a 6 letter domain?

Where did he say there was any more value in a 5 letter domain than a 6 letter one? I would say their is none by the way.

I would think it is obvious, all other things being equal, that fewer letters are more memorable, easier to type, etc.

Of course, if it is 5-letter gibberish versus 6- or 7-letter "real" words, the real words would probably win. But now, we have arguably "real" words like "Google" and "Ebay" which were in the "gibberish" category 15 years ago. So that makes pronounceable gibberish look better than, say, "Amazon", which out of context still means a tribe or river just as much as a web store.

So it is more like "it depends", than "there is no extra value".

Any chance we could have one search that allows us to search the character limit?

Awesome! Thanks for this — already grabbed a couple.

I fail to see the use for this. Why exactly would you want to know what pronounceable 5-char domains there are? It's like two minutes work to script this yourself.

Edit: Also neat how there is text and a copyright notice at the bottom which you'll never be able to read because the page automatically loads more domains. It's barely readable when holding down the end button...

"It's like two minutes work to script this yourself"

Well, it's like zero minutes of work to use this site.

It annoys me that this doesn't include the .com in the character count.

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