
Show HN: Namegine – find a name for your startup or product - kiechu
https://namegine.com/namesearch
======
elefanten
Quick thoughts:

-The pitch line makes it sound like it assesses the 'quality' of the name rather than it's availability/similarity. I was expecting something that would 'rate' a name based on some kind of popularity or sentiment score.

-Im not really a fan of the name, which is a problem that stands out when your product is about good names. "Namegine" parses strangely, I think my brain's looking for another "n" to complete the word "engine" and keeps wanting to pronounce this word "Namm-Egg-Inn". Honestly, I think just NameEngine would be a better name. Obviously very subjective though.

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codebeaker
> -Im not really a fan of the name, which is a problem that stands out when
> your product is about good names. "Namegine" parses strangely, I think my
> brain's looking for another "n" to complete the word "engine" and keeps
> wanting to pronounce this word "Namm-Egg-Inn". Honestly, I think just
> NameEngine would be a better name. Obviously very subjective though.

Absolutely, at the risk of bike shedding, for a German/English speaker this
parses really strangely. The parent comment nailed the problems I have looking
for another missing consonant.

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taormina
NameNgine?

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Kagerjay
I find naming anything where:

\- lastletter of first word

\- firstletter of last word

are the same thing gets confusing.

nameengine.com

Maybe this is just me, but I went as far as selecting my first phone number so
that it's easy to remember as well

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mikejarema
Congrats on the launch.

I run Namevine.com and have for 6+ years. It does much of the same thing.

Did you not consider naming clashes/confusion yourselves when creating the
product?

~~~
kiechu
It's nice to meet competitors. We have run the name against trademarks
databases. The product was not ready when we registered our domain, but that's
valuable feedback, to look out for similar domains.

~~~
mikejarema
Thanks for the reply, likewise.

And to echo another question in the comments, how is the name pronounced
exactly? On reading it, it seems "gine" is likely pronounced "jin" or "gin" as
in "engine".

~~~
kiechu
That was the intention. It was meant as an engine for names.

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kristiandupont
Slightly related, I made this name generator that will make up words so you
are unlikely to run into something that already exists:
[https://github.com/kristiandupont/conkyte](https://github.com/kristiandupont/conkyte)

It uses a couple of different techniques, I'd love to add more if you have
any!

~~~
zrobotics
Very cool, I want to dig a little deeper into that when I'm not on mobile.
That was spitting out some of the best generated names I've seen, they weren't
all good but they were all pronouncable for an English speaker.

~~~
klaczynskim
Thanks for the comment. Sorry to disapoint you but the names you see in the
first section of our tool are not generated names. These are the names of
similar names already registered as a trademark with United Stated Patent &
Trademark Office. So you can check if there are any conflicting trade names
(trademarks) to the one you are searching.

------
codingdave
I like the idea, but all I am getting is "Searching... Please Wait"

Even without seeing results, though - looking for an existing business name in
the state you want to register your company would also be useful.

~~~
kiechu
We are experiencing some issues with a hosting providing we try to figure out.

~~~
gammateam
a free lambda node or generic compute instance could run this site and do
everything its trying to do

it can't check for twitter profiles?

oh brother..

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kiechu
We run it on Heroku on production quality dynos. Heroku came out to be a
bottle neck. Moving things to lambda is an option we will seriously consider.
Checking for, Twitter as well.

~~~
gammateam
What happened then? It was able to serve the site but not do API calls, so no
mem-cache in front of your database? The Redis mem-cache didn't flush itself
when full?

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kiechu
The site is served via AWS CloudFront. It is SPA app hosted on S3. The API is
on Heroku. No mem-cache anywhere. To search we use ElasticSearch hosted on
AWS. We bump up the specs to speed it up but that was not the core problem.

I suspect Heroku Postgres DB. We didn't used some Hobby version and I think it
is the real bottle neck + some unnecessary middleware for the API that also
requires DB.

~~~
gammateam
maybe a mem-cache then?

DB's have limited connections and are often billed as such, the mem-cache
might help if there are any repeatable things. It might not be useful for your
solution though since everyone searches for their own things all the time.

~~~
kiechu
Increasing DB plan did the job.

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dlhavema
Seems broken on mobile. Android Chrome. Cant click anyt hi ing to proceed.
Neat concept. I'll try it on my mac...

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klaczynskim
don't have mobile version yet, sorry.

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dlhavema
Thanks for following up,

I tried it on my mac ( looked good) but as you/your teammate reported, it is
having issues getting data back from the API, every call is returning a 502

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conductr
Not my area of expertise but it would be functional if I could just resize it.
It seems locked on this zoom level. But I’m of the opinion that desktop UI on
mobile is just fine because I know how to zoom, if I’m allowed.

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Jack000
I'm not sure what facebook availability means - the term I searched for says
"available" but the account name is taken. Does it mean something else (page
name? I'm not very familiar with facebook..)

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kiechu
Yes. It checks if a Facebook Page url for a given name is free.

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sanityvampire
Idea: once you have a steady stream of users, automate some domain name
squatting. Buy the cheap ones (.xyz, .website, etc.) for every name, then
threaten submitters with libel blogs unless they pay up.

~~~
klaczynskim
I think it would rather be short-time revenue stream... We aim for a long-term
relationship with our future customers :)

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shapov
Although I am sure your intentions are pure, he raises a valid point. I think
you'd benefit from making it apparent that "we won't steal or squat you name"
somewhere on the landing page.

I think it's a fantastic idea, keep up the good work.

~~~
kiechu
Thanks. That's valid point. We are against front running or black hat SEO.
That's not the place we want to be.

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maushu
You forgot to add the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to your api:

Failed to load
[https://api.namegine.com/api/v1/*](https://api.namegine.com/api/v1/*): No
'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource.
Origin '[https://namegine.com'](https://namegine.com') is therefore not
allowed access. The response had HTTP status code 503.

~~~
kiechu
We had API cached by ClodFront. In the process of troubleshooting we turned it
off and we attached frontend directly to API. There should be CORS headers
though. The problem was more scalability problem. It's too soon to say for
sure, but getting rid of some middleware and scaling Heroku Dynos helped.

~~~
Cyberdog
I presume "ClodFront" was a typo, but given the frustrations I've had with it
myself, I'm not certain.

~~~
kiechu
Yup, CloudFront. Less typo more like Freudian slip. :D

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fipple
Hard to trust a naming product with such a clumsy name itself.

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penagwin
I love the idea! Everybody has projects (for fun, hobby, or serious projects)
and you see it all the time were the name is already used by [insert other
large library/project] or it translates poorly in another language [becomes
the word "poop" or something].

This is really cool! :D

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jazzyjackson
This worked perfectly for me with a couple of project names I've got. Was glad
to see no one trademarked it and the words mean about the same thing in most
languages. So thanks!

FYI: div.contactUs panel that says "Interested in Trademark Registration" is
covered by the namesearch-Hintcontainer with its z-index of 500. It also gets
especially screwy on narrow screen width, and obscures the footer text. So I
hope you can make some quick CSS adjustments there.

Nice service.

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zodPod
I love this. With the excessive use of dictionary words it's nice that there
is now a way to search so that hopefully people will stop naming projects
"Hydrogen" since there are 376 pages worth of results for it. lol

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djstein
having lots of problems interacting with the site on FireFox Nightly. Can't
close the subscription banner for example.

~~~
kiechu
Thanks. We will look into that.

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klaczynskim
If any of you guys want to get product updates, just drop me a line at
maciej@namegine.com (no spam policy).

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scandox
Oh how well I remember "Namerazor"..."so good it named itself".

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godelmachine
Anyone else hits on the link above and gets nothing?

~~~
kiechu
We got stability. We had to remove a middleware, increase number of Heroku
Dynos to ridiculous amount and we had to change Whois provider.

~~~
godelmachine
Don't see yet

~~~
kiechu
What browser do you use?

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godelmachine
Chrome. Your site is still not working

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kiechu
That's strange. We see on analytics that app works correctly. Is is mobile or
desktop Chrome? What kind of error do you get?

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godelmachine
Tried from Firefox this time. This is what I got →

"Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to namegine.com. SSL received a record
that exceeded the maximum permissible length. Error code:
SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG

    
    
        The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
        Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem."
    

Same public IP address as below.

Thanks.

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geff82
2018 and it is unusable on an iPhone SE.

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adriansky
Using it on mobile it's a nightmare

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zrobotics
Same, completely broken in both android Firefox and brave. Worked in brave
desktop mode, unusable entirely in Firefox. Plus, it didn't seem to offer much
utility over a Google search for the name under consideration.

