Show HN: Find available domains related to your keyword
confirm.io
confirm.io
A few ideas:
- If you're willing to consider limiting the TLDs to just .coms, you can then use the .com zone file to check the availability of domains much much faster than methods. Using this technique Lean Domain Search is able to check the availability of 5,000 domains in about a second. I wrote about how to get access to the VeriSign zone file here [2]. Parsing it so your app can access it in real time is tricky, but I can go into more detail over email if you want to explore that route.
- One thing to think about is whether figuring out the search volume is that important for your users. If it's a challenge getting that data from SEMrush or if it's slow or if it just clutters up the interface, consider dropping it and focusing on the quality of the suggestions. More information is not necessarily better for users (it depends what problem you are solving and for whom).
- If you want to a quick list of prefixes and suffixes to pair the user's search term with, I previously analyzed all registered .com's to figure out what the most common ones are. That list is available here if you're interested [3].
- I wound recommend identifying a specific pain point that a specific group of users have that isn't addressed well by existing tools and focus all of your efforts on solving that. The more focused you make your app, this better.
Props on getting users to tweet about the app to show more suggestions. I used to do that with Lean Domain Search and it works really, really well.
I'm happy to chat over email if you'd like. See my profile for contact details.
Best of luck with this -- congrats for launching!
[1] http://www.leandomainsearch.com
[2] http://www.leandomainsearch.com/blog/16-how-to-get-access-to...
[3] http://www.leandomainsearch.com/top-domain-name-prefixes-and...
Two issues I've found after using it twice:
* It returns exact-match like domains, those got decimated in October 2012. (low quality content on exact match domains), and they are proving more difficult to rank related to "keyword over-optimisation" because the keyword already appears in the domain name. Creating content trying not not to overrepeat that keyword in the slug, or path, or content is awkward and unnatural. Better instead to go for a brandable domain rather than a colourless exact match domain
* The suggestions don't take into account trademarks and existing company names. So making domain suggestions of WalmartStock.TLD and WalmartLocations.TLD, and even Walmart.bix is treading in murky territory.
Realistically how could the author avoid that? Should he/she compile a list of every trademark registered and not suggest domains containing any of them?
That is a responsibility for the user.
My feedback based on a bit of experience in this space [1]
1. Consider sticking to just .com and .net Most people don't care about the remaining extensions.
2. Increase the list of results to greater than 100 so the end user has greater choice in selecting the right domain name.
3. Don't show the list of domains that are not available. Only show unregistered domains.
4. Search volume keyword based domains are usually long. If you want only .com then it is harder still as most are taken.
[1] I built a similar feature into DomainMongrel.com
[2] It is similar to Lean Domain Search except that it uses a prediction algorithm to find related prefixes and suffixes.
I followed Matt1's advice from his blog and used zone files to make sure that the domains are available.
$ host confirm.io
confirm.io has address 46.246.95.37
If I'm going to wait for a small handful of domain suggestions, I'd prefer to only see what is available (which may require a lot more queries on the back end, but would improve the user experience in my opinion).
Also, I've gotta throw in a shameless plug for my own domain suggestion tool for new gTLDs:
Apache hit the memory limits constantly, and in the end I had change to nginx. The service has been working fine for a couple of hours, so if you're still interested you can try it out.
Apologies for not being prepared.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:B24LOWH...