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Comment by mikejarema | Hacker News Reader

Who's behind this anyways?

I'm genuinely curious because (1) it doesn't seem to be presented in their FAQ nor on-site and (2) the WHOIS info for namegrep.com is private.

While this isn't a huge red flag, it is a little suspicious that I could be handing over my branding strategies (if one could call regexps "strategies) to some unknown 3rd party.

(FWIW, I built a similar tool, but I don't go to any lengths to hide my involvement)

EDIT: removed link to my similar tool, wasn't intending to hijack any clicks, but rather get the discussion going on whether its important to you as a user of this tool to know who you're dealing with

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Got a few downvotes, is this not a relevant concern?

Perhaps due to listing my similar tool (removed from above comment).

It's a reasonable question you asked but I've noticed a tendency to get downvoted for asking similar questions.

There is domain name frontrunning for sure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running

My speculation is that downvotes come from these cases:

a) Somebody that is well known on HN posts something and you are just supposed to know that they are well known.

b) General trusting and good nature of hackers and lack of cynicism (on the part of the people who downvote that is not all hackers).

But it is definitely a reasonable thing to ask to be clarified and instead of downvoting people should really just explain why they feel the site should be trusted.

We're just two developers working solo, based in Portugal. We didn't create any public profiles, but feel free to contact us ;) As for your question concerning privacy: it was also one of my main concerns. We don't log or track anything on our servers, and we will keep it that way.

Makes sense, thanks for the response, I really like the tool.

I think one area where Namegrep would benefit is to offer a few more examples to try out. As a "hacker" myself I immediately understand the power of the tool, but still want to see a few more interesting regexps that actually yield some worthwhile domains.

That and inserting a subtle horizontal divider in the result search everytime I press the search button (while in regexp mode). That way, at a glance I can see where my previous query ended and my new one began.

Awesome work!

I can vouch for alixaxel. This is his tool and he's pretty legit. You can find his code submissions on bountify.co to see how he's contributed to the Hacker community. Plus he's submitted a few other HN posts that got upwards of 200 points, etc.

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