
Show HN: NameQL – Find a name in milliseconds - mcrowe
https://www.nameql.com
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mcrowe
Hi hackers! I built NameQL to help me find names for my new products, and I
hope you'll find it helpful too.

It considers 100k+ names in milliseconds and shows you the best for which
[name].com is available. Sure, tools like this exist, but I don't know of any
that come close in terms of speed.

I used an n-gram predictive model, trained on an English word corpus to
generate the suggestions. For ridiculous performance, I used a Bloom filter
backed by Redis, together with some sneaky and caching and prefetching.

My next plans are to enhance this by searching the app stores for similarly
named apps, and also checking for relevant trademarks, since I find myself
doing that a lot manually. And I would like to add more advance name
generation controls, like choosing prefix words matching parts of speech and
using n-gram word models to generate phrase suggestions.

Thanks for checking it out!

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ehllo
If you can provide lots of names fast, you should definitly show that your
users. Dont let them click over hundreds of sites with a small amount of
names.

~~~
mcrowe
Thanks for your thoughts ehllo. I don't happen to agree that this would be a
better design. The tool is meant to be useful, not impressive.

~~~
ehllo
Just one thought about usefullness with your design. Give the user the option
to mark/remember names. If the user finds a good name at the first page, there
is a good chance that the user can not remeber the name from page 1 on page
10.

~~~
mcrowe
Good idea. If you click on the name you can tap on "Save" to add it to your
saved names list. Does that provide what you wanted?

~~~
ehllo
Make sense now, but maybe you should reduce the clicks(on the desktop) for the
"1\. open modal -> 2\. save/buy click -> 3\. close modal" action. There is
enough space to the left and right side of the names.

~~~
mcrowe
You're right. It is too many clicks to save a name you like. The feature would
be more discoverable that way, too.

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geoffjk
Nicely done! There are other tools that do the same thing but the usability is
far better in this one.

~~~
mcrowe
Thanks! That's kind of what I was going for. It's a crowded market, but I felt
like there wasn't a __great __solution yet.

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ecesena
This is great, and the trademark would be an awesome addition! I also often
use namechk to validate socials right after I find a good .com... maybe you
can link to them (note: i’m not affiliate)

~~~
mcrowe
Thanks! I didn't know about namechk, actually. Definitely worth looking in to
an integration, or adopting some of that functionality. Good idea!

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jazoom
This is awesome. Thanks. Where do you query the data from? Do you scrape it
from somewhere and store it in your own database?

~~~
mcrowe
Thanks! You can request access to zone files from the domain authorities. I
take the raw zone file and load it into a series of Bloom filters backed by
Redis. There are a lot of domains to check against, and a probabilistic data
structure is the only way to store it in memory, which you need for
performance. This has the small caveat that the tool will accidentally think a
domain is __not __available about 0.1% of the time. However, it shouldn 't
ever report domains as available when they are not. So that works quite well
for a tool like this.

~~~
jazoom
Very impressive. I will be using this in future.

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genbit
This is the best tool I've used so far for domain searching. Thanks!

~~~
mcrowe
So glad you find it useful!

