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How to find a short domain name

zegup.com

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Re: How to find a short domain name

#51

Post by sounds »

larrys wrote: post #47
sounds wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm learning so much from this discussion. I'll throw in my data point (I believe it's relevant): I ran shell scripts on 10 nodes with fast backbone connections, making DNS queries of all possible 4-letter and 5-letter .com's. Obviously, if the domain doesn't NXDOMAIN, it has been taken. At the time (before domain squatting was shut down) all legal 4-letter domains were taken. From the NXDOMAINs, I ran a much slower…

"domain squatting was shut down" No such thing as what you are saying. You are probably referring to the penalties that are assessed for domain tasting whereby a registrar is penalized if they return to many domains relative to the ratio of registered domains (registrars also pay more money to ICANN depending on how they handle this as well). Much to much work to do the way you are doing it. You need to get a copy of…

Thanks for the great insights!

Re: How to find a short domain name

#52

Post by downx3 »

neilk wrote: post #33
matt1 wrote: post #21

A few years back I built Domain Pigeon, a similar tool, that generated web 2.0-style domain names and made them available to visitors. One of my big lessons learned from that experience was that web 2.0 style domain names are NOT good domain names. More often than not people can't remember them and when they can, they misspell it and if they can spell it, it's only because someone had to spell it out when telling it…

I recently obtained a five-letter domain name (Grovr) in .org/.net/.com, and felt good about doing so on the cheap. I hit on the that name out of desperation leading to silliness. The idea has to do with directed acyclic graphs of trust relationships, hence trees, hence "grove". There aren't a lot of real-world analogs, so I'd been struggling to find some short name that explained the concept. I was working with a fe…

I thought the 'web 2' domain names came about, as most dictionary words had been taken. Take a dictionary word and make a small alteration - so that it is no longer a dictionary word - and it's likely you have something unique.

Search engine auto-correction must be an issue though!

I'd probably pick obscure word combos, that wouldn't naturally occur together. Good fun trying them out in a search engine too.

Re: How to find a short domain name

#53

Post by larrys »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #32
tokenadult wrote: post #11

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 appli…

That was my first thought too. Any time I search for a domain name these days, my process goes something like: 1. Enter it into a web browser, see if it's in use or parked 2. If not, run whois on it at the commandline. 3. If not, decide whether I want to buy it. If so, do so right away, otherwise assume it will be lost in a day or so. And I'm not even 100% sure I can trust the browser search, depending on what the DN…

I personally don't feel that this is a reason for concern (very very small chance but yes it is possible). But there is a faster way anyway, cutting out web server not responding etc.

So in any case if you wanted to lessen that chance you could query any public nameserver, assuming you can trust that nameserver.

In a command window, using nslookup as an example, the process would be (using google public dns server but you can use anything that's the point):

nslookup

> server 8.8.8.8

Default server: 8.8.8.8

Address: 8.8.8.8#53

> skymarshal.com

Server: 8.8.8.8

Address: 8.8.8.8#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: skymarshal.com

Address: 208.91.197.26 (comment: name taken!)

> skymarshalxyz.com

Server: 8.8.8.8

Address: 8.8.8.8#53

server can't find skymarshalxyz.com: NXDOMAIN

> www.skymarkshalxyz.com (I made this up)

Server: 8.8.8.8

Address: 8.8.8.8#53

server can't find www.skymarkshalxyz.com: NXDOMAIN

> exit

"can't find" - name might be available - we have determined it's not resolving. Could be a dns issue of course but it's a good first step.

Doing with a browser can give you MORE of a false positive. DNS could respond with an address but the site could be down. Of course getting no response to DNS doesn't ALWAYS mean the domain is available but it's generally fairly accurate. At that point you would do a whois to confirm.

You can write a shell script of course to automate this from the command line.

Re: How to find a short domain name

#54

Post by arkitaip »

shocks wrote: post #34

I felt a bit limited by this, so I've just knocked up a similar tool with far more flexibility. Still actively developing it, but it's far quicker already. http://dev.mindfuzz.net/domain/ Edit: Grammar.

This returns lots of false positives. Certain patterns, LLLL, result in very small result sets (5 items) but when re-searching the pattern, a different set is returned.

Re: How to find a short domain name

#55

Post by opendomain »

We have many short domains: if you want to take on holly wood- you could use Free.TV or if you want a communication startup, try XG.org, Free-fi.com, wusb.com, or wide-fi.com. News site? Syndi.com, bloog.com. Hyperlocal? 4ny.com or 4dc.com. Keyword? Liposculpture.com non-profit? Manna.org My favorite for Big Data is NoSQL.com

While this post is a plug for my open source project OpenDomain - please note that we are not for profit. We have given domain such as Drupal.com, OsCon.com, OpenAjax.org, and Ecmascript.org all for FREE

EDIT: spelling errors edit 2: please do not downvote - as I said before we are not for profit and we support open source. I would love for anyone on hacker news to use any of our domains

Re: How to find a short domain name

#56

Post by shocks »

arkitaip wrote: post #54
shocks wrote: post #34

I felt a bit limited by this, so I've just knocked up a similar tool with far more flexibility. Still actively developing it, but it's far quicker already. http://dev.mindfuzz.net/domain/ Edit: Grammar.

This returns lots of false positives. Certain patterns, LLLL, result in very small result sets (5 items) but when re-searching the pattern, a different set is returned.

Yes, because I use more of a Monte Carlo approach than a systematic approach. zegup.com is always alphabetic, but since the results are so slow it could take a long time to get to the end of the alphabet.

Re: How to find a short domain name

#58

Post by johnstalcup »

this thing outputs crap. every single name/domain name generator i've seen has been underwhelming, including this one.

do this: * use an emotional connotation dictionary to classify a bunch of poems. * for each emotion category train a markov chain. * allow users to select a couple of emotions, then combine those emotion's markov chains and generate text.

Re: How to find a short domain name

#59

Post by guylhem »

brador wrote: post #31
guylhem wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you can get them for cheap. Got one .com as recently as last year, with the .org as a freebie. I'm now considering selling my 3 letters/numbers domain name - .net and .org.

How much was the .com? I've seen offered prices of $5K+ for fairly generic 4 letter domains...lot's of speculators buying and holdnig I guess...

Speculation- yes. I paid just below 100, and I considered that a tad expansive.

It's not a word but it is easy to say and to remember, and I needed one for a project, so I got it thinking I could reuse it later.

Re: How to find a short domain name

#60

Post by Natsu »

techiferous wrote: post #57
jasonkester wrote: post #19

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

> best name Best (1) currently available (2) 5-letter domain name. I think they did well for these standards.

True, but it's not really that necessary a restriction unless there's some reason that five characters is special. I mean, would you rather have mxurp.com or something meaningful like ycombinator.com?
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