How to find a short domain name • Hacker News Board

Re: How to find a short domain name

#11

Post by tokenadult » Sat, Mar 03, 2012, 12:51 PM UTC

How do we know that as these searches are executed that the domain names don't become unavailable, because someone parks on them? That historically has been the problem with domain-name searches. I'd like an absolute guarantee that the searching is done in a manner that doesn't alert registrars or their cronies to new domain names to park on before running many searches here.

The application is a text-searching application, so I was a bit startled to see "consonant" misspelled as "constonant" throughout the pull-down menus. Usually I expect programmers who work with text string-matching to be attentive to details of natural language text.

Re: How to find a short domain name

#12

Post by meow » Sat, Mar 03, 2012, 1:32 PM UTC

Takes so long to generate first 50 names even when searching with just the defaults... looks like they don't really cache anything..

Re: How to find a short domain name

#13

Post by youlost_thegame » Sat, Mar 03, 2012, 1:38 PM UTC

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what's up with the letter Q?

Re: How to find a short domain name

#14

Post by drewonstuff » Sat, Mar 03, 2012, 1:53 PM UTC

drostie wrote: post #2

This is beautiful, but it's such a shame that US law enforcement have been stealing .com domains from people for things that their users have done. We've had a bunch of Hacker News threads and I don't want to resurrect old beasts of that sort, but some option for non dot-com names would be wonderful. (Especially because .com reminds me of 1999-2001 at this point and it seems like we designers should perhaps be treati…

I couldn't disagree more with that we should be treating .com as passe. While .me or whatever is "cool", the majority of the world still relates to .com's the most. I'm in Taiwan right now and the people here probably have no idea what a .me or a .it is. They are using .com.tw, not .me.tw (and yes, of course I understand that .me is from Montenegro and this would never be possible). And the "reminds me of 1999-2001" just sounds silly...it goes without saying that there have been thousands of successful .com's since 2001, like the one you are looking at right now.

Re: How to find a short domain name

#15

Post by clone1018 » Sat, Mar 03, 2012, 2:03 PM UTC

meow wrote: post #12

Takes so long to generate first 50 names even when searching with just the defaults... looks like they don't really cache anything..

Cache random results?

Re: How to find a short domain name

#16

Post by WA » Sat, Mar 03, 2012, 2:09 PM UTC

I got this error a little later, when the script was already running for a while:

Error Connecting To Server: whois.crsnic.net

Maybe you should not use "whois" but just a simple "host" or "ping" to resolve whether or not a domain is free. When in doubt, you can still do an "whois", but for a heuristic approach, it would be waaay faster.

Re: How to find a short domain name

#17

Post by drblast » Sat, Mar 03, 2012, 2:21 PM UTC

youlost_thegame wrote: post #13

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what's up with the letter Q?

Maybe it's like scrabble where you'd always want a u afterward.

It's a rather odd constraint given the other options.

Re: How to find a short domain name

#18

Post by damusnet » Sat, Mar 03, 2012, 2:34 PM UTC

Does it mean that all 4-letter-.com domain names are taken?

Re: How to find a short domain name

#19

Post by jasonkester » Sat, Mar 03, 2012, 2:46 PM UTC

Am I right to be suspicious of this service if the best name it could find for their own domain was zegup?

Re: How to find a short domain name

#20

Post by gigq » Sat, Mar 03, 2012, 2:53 PM UTC

damusnet wrote: post #18

Does it mean that all 4-letter-.com domain names are taken?

Yep, all 4 letter domains were registered back in 2007 (http://www.dotsauce.com/2007/11/02/four-letter-domains-all-r...).

Of course domains expire or are sold between owners so getting a 4 letter domain is still possible.