

Show HN: 51,000 6 character domains - jqueryin
http://www.coreyballou.com/six-character-domain-names/

======
jqueryin
For the last few years I've been toying with a variety of techniques for
finding available domain names. This is one of my more recent attempts that I
thought would be useful to all of you on HN. I created a simple search and
alphabetical lookup with pagination to be able to browse through these domains
as easily as possible. I built the website search functionality yesterday, so
it was quick and dirty (but hopefully the UI is clean enough).

Since the current listing is cached, the only way to tell if a domain is truly
still available (and some other HN member hasn't picked it up), you need to
click the "Test" button to run a new WHOIS test. If the domain is taken, it'll
automatically be removed and you'll be informed. If not, you'll get a nice
little success message with both purchase buttons.

I'd love any suggestions. Let us know if you find anything good :)

~~~
simonsarris
>Let us know if you find anything good :)

I was surprised saalty.com wasn't taken. It sounds so damn cute. I just bought
it on impulse because my heart melts at the drop of a hat for some dumb
reason.

Now I have to draw something cute to put there, like a little deer licking a
salt cube.

~~~
Mz
That reminds me: I need to do a "salt lick" t-shirt at some point. My
condition is a salt wasting condition. People like me supposedly taste saltier
than other people. I have joked to friends that when I am well enough to get a
sex life again, I should do a quiet little survey and ask a few men if, in
fact, I taste saltier than usual. Still toying with how to make the t-shirt
not _too_ nasty, on the theory that a kid might want one.

~~~
ebiester
Is there more that can be done for your condition than simply eating a lot of
salt?

~~~
Mz
I've done quite a lot more than simply eat more salt. However, no one really
cares. And I'm just a tad more stressed than usual tonight. My health site is
listed in my profile if you are curious.

Take care.

------
matt1
Hey Corey, Lean Domain Search creator here -- nice site and list.

One thing I'd recommend is to have users click on the results to show them
registration options. This gives you the added benefit of being able to
automatically double-check that the domain is still available which makes for
a much smoother workflow. This would also free up space on your interface
which could let you display the results in multiple columns, letting you fit
more results on a single page. You can see this in action at Lean Domain
Search by searching for a keyword and then clicking one of the available
results, ex: <http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=jquery>

Overall nice start though. Looking forward to seeing other domain name
generation algorithm results.

~~~
hpathiraja
Hey, just thought I'd let you know that the Twitter availability lookup
doesn't seem to work correctly. Even for usernames that are available, it's
notifying that they are taken.

~~~
matt1
Thanks -- can you give me an example?

~~~
hpathiraja
For an example, if you click on the jQuery example query that you posted, one
of the search results is "greenjquery.com". When you click on it, it says
"@greenjquery" is not available on Twitter, though it's available when you try
to register on Twitter.

~~~
matt1
Good catch! There was a small bug that I just fixed. Appreciate it!

------
hornbaker
Possible bug: as I'm scrolling down any list, for example
<http://www.coreyballou.com/six-character-domain-names/L/>, and the infinite
scroll refreshes at the bottom, I'm seeing many, many dupes – like the list is
repeating. Makes the search very frustrating to keep seeing the same words.
I'd second the request for a downloadable text list of names if you're feeling
generous. :)

------
stephenhandley
cool idea but the design is frustrating.

there's a lot of noise on the page considering all I want to see are the names
and they only occupy about 1/16th of the screen currently. would be more
easily consumable if you grouped by bigrams and had each row devoted to a
given leading bigram.

al

    
    
      hi        fi        ...
    
        alhico    alfiof
    
        alhiea    alfiou
    
        ...
    

be

...

if i click on a name, then show the affiliate links.. otherwise they're just
wasting space.

given that all the domains you're displaying are the same length, you have a
nice constraint to work with in the design and could really use space well.

------
jasondenizac
Thanks for this - any way you'd be willing to post the raw list somewhere? I'd
love to search and sort it with some other NLP factors (pronounceability, etc)

------
jqueryin
Thanks for all of the comments today. I just barely added infinite scroll. I
didn't have time to merge it with the pagination functionality, so changing
the paginator at the top will reset the infinite scroll (and I'm not yet using
HTML5 history and hashing). I'll get around to that in the near future, but
this should help you all find things a bit faster.

------
foxhop
You know what would make searching easier? Serve the raw ascii list. I know
you have affiliate links and all but a list is worth more. In fact, I'll pay
you $10 for your list. I'd pay you $15 a month for a raw data feed to your
list.

Make a company out of the data you mined, don't make money for a namecheap and
godaddy!

------
PaulHoule
Perhaps this is good for trademarkable names that will impress investors.

There are still many names of the form

XY.com

where X and Y are two keywords relevant to your business. Very little is
certain in SEO, but I've never met an SEO who didn't believe that keywords in
the domain name will help you get traffic from people looking for "X", "Y" and
"X Y".

The cost effectiveness of finding a good domain name with keywords is
excellent for a "free" name and even fair in some cases if you spend $1k for a
domain name. Compare that to the high costs and risks of link building and
content creation.

~~~
jqueryin
If you know your market well and have a variety of "X" and "Y" keywords, I'd
highly suggest checking out <http://bustaname.com>. The site is fantastic for
generating available word combinations.

~~~
minikomi
I also just used leandomain to find the name for a camera search site I'm
working on. It gave me wantcamera.com ... sold!

------
jameswilsterman
Hypothetically could it be a good investment to buy all of these for $500K/yr?

~~~
ohashi
Horrible investment. You're buying what people haven't picked up in 27 years.
If you want to see what happens when people mass buy based on patterns lookup
what happened to 4 letter .coms. There was quite a bubble that's been long
since burst. I think a lot are available again (the garbage). This would be
similar to buying up all the garbage. There could be a few winners but I
highly doubt you could make enough money to carry the rest.

~~~
jqueryin
I can attest to having previously gone through and purchased some of these. I
had que9.com (why9, lol) as well as a-fk.com which I thought was quite
clever...

It really just ends up being a waste unless it's easily to both memorize and
type. That coupled with a great idea, execution, and marketing, of course :)

------
freehunter
Something I just noticed: in your alphabetical list to narrow the results, it
skips from E to H, indicating there is nothing with F. If you search for F,
though, there are 25 pages of results.

~~~
jqueryin
Good find, I must've removed it by accident when I was removing the empty
results :) I'll get it back in!

------
carlsednaoui
Looks good - I'm also a big fan of <http://www.leandomainsearch.com/>

------
kmfrk
Something is wrong with the infinite-scroll paginator. For t domains, it seems
to loop or something, after it gets to tec-.

------
ereckers
It looks to me like there is nothing beginning with w, x, y, z. Am I not
seeing it right?

~~~
jqueryin
Nope, that's correct. Those letters do not have high frequency 2-letter
combinations compared to the others.

------
c_t_montgomery
Nice. You should run the domains through domai.nr's "info" API
(<http://domai.nr/api/docs/json#info-api>), so the user doesn't have to
manually test by clicking the button.

~~~
jqueryin
Thanks for the suggestion :) I'd almost prefer to continue doing the "Test"
button since it'll likely only occur on a domain a user is interested in
(although bad UX). I'm trying to keep my bandwidth and network IO to a minimum
:)

I could, however, change my method of performing a WHOIS check for querying
domai.nr instead, since I likely won't hit WHOIS limits that way.

------
melvinmt
For quick scan lists like this I'd either want to have small result lists
above the fold so I can keep pressing 'Next' without scrolling down or huge
lists (like leandomainsearch has) where I don't need to press 'Next'.

~~~
jqueryin
I'll look into adding infinite scroll, it makes sense to have. I don't want to
limit to something like 10 domains above the fold because it's such a limited
set to look at and prev/next adds more barriers to entry for viewing more
domains.

------
PaulMest
Have you seen Domize? How is this better than that? Because it offers browsing
instead of just searching?

Domize - <http://domize.com/>

------
MattBearman
Site looks cool. Just a heads up, you've got a bit of php "*/?>" showing on
your buy now text.

~~~
jqueryin
Thanks for the heads up. I've pushed at least 10 times today, cowboy coded the
fix... Kids, don't try this at home.

------
hotdox
there are no domain names in range of SK - SS. Is this some bug or this
bigramms are not popular?

~~~
jqueryin
Hey, not sure if you're referring to beginning or ending with SK - SS. I'm
only searching based on pattern matching of "TERM%" to ensure I'm hitting the
db index. If you're referring to the beginning of a word, it's because I
didn't handle the scenario of using the most popular starting 2 characters,
just highest frequency characters overall.

The domains could definitely be improved upon if I used the highest frequency
2 letter beginnings as well as the highest frequency 2 letter endings.
Instead, the listing is based on matching of the generalized list of highest
letter frequencies.

Feel free to ask any more questions!

------
davidbrent
Scrolled through for a few minutes and found one I had to buy. Domains are
addictive.

------
kngl
What's wrong with <http://domai.nr> ?

~~~
jqueryin
Nothing wrong with domai.nr, I actually love it. I also love bustaname. Both
of those require you to have some idea of what you're searching for
beforehand. This is for those of us who want to browse through a list of
possibilities and remove guesswork.

------
moses1400
i want to sell htmlc.com - send me an email if you want to buy it :) have
owned it for years and years - never used it - was going to be part of my
htmlcenter.com site but never got around to it.

------
artursapek
Good on you for linking to NameCheap by default.

------
zaidmo
awesome site - it's so hard to find a good domain name

------
obilgic
what about 5 letter.coms

~~~
jqueryin
Just a heads up. I'm currently running through a list of 32,488 possible
5-char combinations using a combination of high frequency bigrams, trigrams,
and high frequency beginning and ending letters. When I'm done and get a new
DB table I'll put up a new link for you :-P

It'll take a number of hours to complete (ew), but I'll post something when I
can. I'm actually off on vacation to get married tomorrow morning, so if it
doesn't finish before 5 today I won't have it up for over a week...

~~~
abailin
Looking forward to it! Congrats on your wedding.

