

Find a Great Domain Name (Beta code is YCOMBINATOR) - bradpineau
http://www.domainhole.com

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magic5227
Its funny cause, domainhole is a terrible name

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sebkomianos
I quite like the name to be honest.

And I sure like the design as well.

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ksolanki
I too quite liked the name. It incites a strong reaction, which is
good...Guess one either likes it or hates it.

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symkat
_instant check_

First of all, it's limited to only .com's. That seems silly. I think I'm in
the fairly normal group of people who would want to check at least org and net
too, if not io, pl, and all the other random strange domains. The instant
check service does not seem unique and seems more limited than even the most
basic domain checker.

 _name spinner_

This idea is boring. Given a name already either prepend or append a word that
falls into a given "group" and check for it's availability in a single TLD.
This time that TLD is at least selectable.

 _expired domain search_

Given a few words locate domains for which that is a substring of if they have
recently expired or are in pending delete. I don't see how this is
particularly useful, you're finding domains that may or may not be able to be
bought in the near future (registrars can still take back a domain that is in
pendingDelete status for a few to ICANN).

From my perspective this is fun from a "hey, I wonder what people use this
substring and don't pay their bill" game, but not really for finding a domain
name unless I happen to be inspired by one of the domains and check under a
different TLD.

 _Overall_

I think the approach that is being taken here is not original and has been
done hundreds of times. I have a hard time naming things and have looked
repeatedly for a "Name this thing for me!" service. This is another
disappointment.

I do think that this is a problem domain that has yet to be solved and that a
good solution would make a decent company. I don't think this service at this
point comes close to even beginning to solve the problem.

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bradpineau
The expired domain search becomes valuable when you put in "2" into the
"number of words" input. Now you're getting nice keyword rich 2 word domains.
If you're searching for domains that haven't expired yet, you're best bet is
to backorder it, and hope to grab it first. We'll add other TLDs for the
instant domain check.

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dbro
caveat: I created a similar site called domainjig.com, so take these as
friendly suggestions.

The expired domain search is cool, well done with this tool.

Make it faster. Right now, loading the page to search for availability is
taking longer than 10 seconds. When searching using the different tools, the
response comes back after a few seconds delay. If you're comfortable
discussing it, what are the major components of the backend? Is your data
stored in RAM? Can you make the availability check instant?

eg. the expired domain search for "rabbit" over the last 30 days took a few
minutes to return 2 pages of results. maybe the traffic referred from this
post on HN is finding some bottlenecks for you?

The name spinner came up with some interesting suggestions. I'd suggest
removing or hiding some of the advanced options, in favor of simplifying the
default interface.

Hope that helps.

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mendicant
I really like it. Especially that with each suggestion it tells you whether or
not it is available.

The hardest thing I had with the site was when there were a lot of suggestions
I had a lot of trouble reading through all of them, kind of like the words all
ended up running together. It might just be me though.

My wife has been looking for a domain name for a while now, and we've already
found a couple possibilities because of this.

As a future feature suggestion for the domain spinner -- At some point it
would be really cool if you could find a way to choose a domain name that you
kind of like, choose it and only show ones that are similar to it. This would
be especially good when combining with adjectives. Some may be looking for
more cheerful or positive adjectives while others may be looking for powerful
or possibly negative ones.

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bradpineau
Awesome comments and thanks to all for the suggestions. We've got an awesome
list and we'll start implementing.

Apologies for the slow expired domain search. The server is getting NAILED and
we're obviously not equipped to handle the scale yet. I'll use the excuse: Hey
- we're in Beta!

So we're working on the scale issue as we speak. Hope to have instant searches
back ASAP.

For those who asked - site is built on the LAMP stack.

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swGooF
Really fun site. I think it is helpful. I did, however, think the list that
was returned was too long by default. Maybe leave off the unavailable one?

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swGooF
My comment applies to the Name Spinner.

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stevenj
You should be able to just edit your parent comment (for awhile longer at
least).

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revetkn
If you've got all the data stored off up-front, the search should be near-
instant. As-is, it's nearly unusably slow.

However, if the delay is caused by hitting the network for each search result
on the backend (or something along those lines), maybe it would be nice to
quickly return an initial barebones dataset and then the browser could do an
async fetch of each record's details.

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wccrawford
Nice site!

What surprised me was how many domains were taken that didn't have names I'd
consider worthwhile... Weird.

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bradpineau
A "First Week of Testing Update" has been posted to the homepage - we've
addressed some issues users have had. Check it out -
<http://www.domainhole.com/>

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dts
It seems like you arent normalising all strings to lowercase which has a huge
impact on available results in the name spinner. If PitbullHelp.com is
unavailable pitbullhelp.com shouldnt be as well.

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mikerhoads
This is a great app. I have a similar site that is more curated but less
searchable: <http://www.scoratic.com>

What are you built on?

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HedgeMage
I like it, overall, but it would be much more useful if I could click to add
domains to a "maybe list" while I try a few different things to find what I
want.

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bradpineau
On the expired domain search, you can "star" a domain to look at it later.
We'll add that starring option to the other tools ASAP.

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HedgeMage
Nifty :)

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sinaiman
It is going quite slow for me. All three tools.

Usually ajaxwhois.com and instantdomainsearch.com are completely instantaneous
when I use those tools.

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sinaiman
Slow as in I didn't wait around to see the results, like >1 minute.

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kevindication
Name spinner returned a huge list of available names with a suffix appended to
my seed, but then that list was repeated as unavailable beneath it.

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bradpineau
Best use of the expired search tool: put "2" in the "number of words" input,
and you'll find some great 2 word keyword specific domains

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imwilsonxu
A little suggestiong: make the fonts bigger.

I have to zoom in to 144% (in Chrome) to make it readable.

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eli
It would be neat if it could also filter or score domains based on how
pronounceable they are.

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bradpineau
We have a pronouncable checkbox/score coming next week!

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nddrylliog
skinnycoders.com, uptightcoders.com and uglycoders.com are taken.

fatcoders.com, pleasantcoders.com and handsomecoders.com are free.

You know what to do.

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bradpineau
A new tool is available - a web 2.0 name generator.

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bradpineau
You can use beta code: YCOMBINATOR

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peacewise
Great site. It already helped me find a name for my project.

