

Ask HN: Review my app again? Short domain name search - jcrocholl
http://www.nxdom.com/

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icey
I really like the new setup. It's much less confusing than it was before.

I've used it every few days since you first announced it here - it's pretty
fun to play around with.

I don't know how feasible it is to do this, but instead of prefix and suffix,
I would _really_ like to be able to use wildcards in my search. For example,
say I'm looking for a domain that starts with the word "dog" and ends with
"cat" or "cats"; I would like to be able to search "dog*cat?" instead of 2
boxes over 2 searches (one for the "cat" suffix and one for the "cats"
suffix).

~~~
az
I third the wildcard and make it represent multiple missing letters, not just
one letter per wildcard.

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adunsmoor
It looks like there is a bug when using the prefix and suffix fields together.

Entered "ns" in the prefix field and saw a bunch of domains. Added "ing" to
the suffix field and nothing showed up. I figured the site was just slow until
I realized that it wasn't going to refresh.

Cleared "ing" and typed "g" in the suffix field. Showed results. Then added an
"n" just before the "g" to get "ng". Less results than before as expected.
Then added an "i" just before the "ng" to get "ing".

That gave me a list of domains starting with "ns" and ending in "ing".

(Using Firefox 3.5.7 if that matters)

~~~
jcrocholl
Yes, I know the combined prefix and suffix search doesn't work properly yet.
The reason is that the App Engine datastore doesn't support fancy search, only
sorting with custom indexes. All results for a GQL query must be adjacent in
the index. The indexes for combined prefix+suffix search are still building
but should be ready in a few days.

~~~
gmurphy
Until that happens, you could reduce it to a single field and show results for
both types of searches. I found the prefix/suffix thing pretty confusing.

~~~
jcrocholl
Actually, I have now enabled the search indexes for the following
prefix+suffix combinations: 4+1, 3+2, 3+1, 2+1, 2+2, 1+1, 1+2, 1+3, 2+3, 1+4.
I may add longer combinations later, but for now they will be shortened and
filtered, e.g. 5+3 will use cached 4+1 and then filter the results in the
browser with JavaScript.

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prosa
Spectacular, and FAST!

One _small_ note, from my experience: it wasn't immediately obvious that
results would appear right away, partly because of the drop down and submit
button at the bottom.

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petercooper
Was yours the site with the numbers to weight the score along the top for each
column? As a geek, I far preferred that because I had more control. As someone
looking at this with the eye of your average user, this system is better. A
bit like comparing vi and Textmate, I guess.

~~~
jcrocholl
Yes, that was the previous version that I announced here on January 1st. I
figured that usability is more important than fine-grained control over the
score weights, because the sort order is not terribly critical. Basically, the
user should be able to adjust the trade-off between short and popular names.
But it's a brainstorming tool, we're not trying to get one particular name to
the very top of the list.

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lkozma
Great project, congratulations.

I am still curious about one aspect: why do you realease the source code?
(same question for browsershots).. I think for such a service the vast
majority is not interested in the backend code and those who are interested
might take it and build a competing product, not being required to release the
modified code. Am I missing something? What is your take on this ?

~~~
jcrocholl
Good question, so I wrote a blog post: <http://nxdom.posterous.com/why-is-
nxdom-open-source>

~~~
lkozma
Thanks for the answer, I agree with all your points. I'm just saying that
still, there is a small technical difference from open source desktop
software: technically, in this case, I can not verify that the source code you
release is exactly the code that you are running on the server, just that the
code reproduces all the "visible" functionality of the site. I wonder if there
exists such a place for hosting trusted web-apps, where one could publish
source code and they would certify that the actual code running on the server
is the same.

~~~
lkozma
Again, I'm not saying you should do anything differently, I'm just trying to
understand if open source makes sense for pure web apps.

------
AdamGibbins
Please add Gandi.net as a registrar, they're by far my favourite and I know
other people have similar strong views.

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araneae
It's very awesome.

One thing that would be very cool... is regex support? :D

But barring that, a "contains" box. I.e. if I don't care if the website starts
with cat or ends with cat, as long as cat is in there somewhere.

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scotje
I really like it, really simple to use and fast like other people said. In
fact, I found a great name related to my main project that I'm going to snap
up.

The first time around though, I didn't notice that I could pick my preferred
registrar at the bottom to get you the referral. Maybe that should default to
empty and ask your preferred registrar on a domain click if it's blank? Just a
thought.

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pbz
Maybe I'm not understanding how it should work, but I'm not getting a lot of
results. For example try to enter something crazy / random in the beginning,
like "kqxj" you get no results. Even for something like ending in "hedule"
(since there seems to be a bug if you type in more than 5 characters) only a
few entries are shown for domains that end in "schedule"... It's pretty fast
though.

~~~
mbrubeck
The site searches a database consisting mostly of recently-expired domains, so
it's not likely to contain any given random string.

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krobertson
Love the simplicity and quality of the site. I like the "How can we improve
this page" everywhere. It is nice to see a constant message of trying to
improve and making it drop dead simple to send feedback.

Above all though, the speed of the lookups is impressive. So many other tools
are slow and clunky.

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lssndrdn
In IE7, the CSS is being completely ignored and the page does not work (Note:
I am behind a proxy, it might have something to do with it). It works with
Firefox.

Also, I know of a domain, seventypercentwater.com, but it doesn't show up in
the list when I search for "seventy". What am I missing?

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jeffepp
Great app, found it from your first go-round here and obviously is much
cleaner visually.

Would be nice to be able to only check certain extensions without losing too
many points (.ly or .us only)

So useful, thank you.

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slig
Hi, since you already have lots of country-specific TLDs, I suggest you to add
.br, or more specifically, ".com.br". I'm not sure on how you could profit
from it, but I bet you can get some traffic from here.

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dschobel
Fantastic work! Just curious, why does it not return any results for long
strings?

For example, putting "hacker" in the Beginning box and "ne" in the Ending box
yields no results.

~~~
jcrocholl
Because it's a search engine for _short_ names, using a large database of
unused and expired domain names. Try searching for "hack" + "ne", or "hack" +
"e" for even more results.

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bemmu
I didn't set any prefix or suffix and instead just selected all the radio
buttons. Now I get it, but at first I was confused why no results are coming
up.

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andreshb
I like it very much, ive used bustaname before, but I think ill try this one
too next time I buy a domain.

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tsestrich
Simply awesome. I must have used every single domain name search app there is
and this is by far the best

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cemregr
This is amazing work. Congratulations.

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appathy
Want to start a dating site? everymate.com is available

~~~
pyre
How about an Aussie-targeted site for finding drinking buddies? :-P

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dmn
Idk what else to say except Awesome :D

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adrianwaj
no .cm ending. Otherwise good. Left sidebar looks weird in Chrome.

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kirpekar
Bookmarked, thanks!

