Show HN: I built a search engine for all domains on the internet
domainexplorer.io
I built DomainExplorer.io, a search and analytics tool that lets you explore newly registered and expired domains across all TLDs — updated daily.
The idea came from my frustration how hard it is to search for registered/expired domains. I wanted a simple and easy-to-use tool with web UI where you could submit queries like:
- Find all domains in .com and .net zones that end with "chatgpt".
- Find all expired domains that have "copilot" substring in name (excluding .ai and .io zones) and their name is shorter than 12 symbols
- Find all domains with "amazon" in name and that were created earlier than June 20, 2023
But there was nothing like that around.
So I decided to built this tool myself.
DomainExplorer.io currently indexes 300M+ active domains from 1,500+ zone files, refreshed daily. You can filter by TLD (zone), name length, active or expired, substring or patterns (e.g. “starts with best”, “ends with copilot”, "contains chatgpt"), and download the results as CSV or JSON.
Tech stack: Go, PostgreSQL, React/TypeScript, hosted on baremetal server (cloud is way too expensive for me for such a project), and a custom search index that I designed and built myself because ElasticSearch/Lucene were either too slow or excessively packed with features that I did not need. As a result, I've built pretty lean and performant search engine for domains, you literally get results within 1-2 seconds across all 300M domains search.
I’d love your feedback — especially around use cases I might be missing (security research, trend tracking, brand monitoring, etc.) and any ideas for making search faster or more useful for developers.
Please give it a try!