

Ask HN: Review my app: Search expired/available short domain names - jcrocholl
http://scoretool.appspot.com/

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dotBen
I like the idea but the source whois data seems quite inaccurate.

It said that digit.com and 6af.com were both free (which I obviously jumped
on) but turns out they are actually registered and not due to expire for some
time.

~~~
jcrocholl
I understand that's annoying, and hope to improve it. The system reports
digit.com free because it doesn't have an A record, but I will fix this by
checking SOA records in the future. I'm not sure why 6af.com is reported free,
maybe there was a temporary DNS problem when I checked it. It should be
updated in a couple of days.

~~~
stse
You could first try the ANY query (which won't return all records though) and
then a whois query on failed ones to be sure. Combined with some smart caching
and affiliate/click tracking (to see if a new domain gets registered).

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GavinB
This is very cool. TheMargarine.com is available--startup millions, here I
come!

Edit: Seriously, great work. Have bookmarked and will be back for my next
domain search.

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mikexstudios
Wow, this is very cool and elegant. I really like how the UI is simplistic and
functional. Thank you for making it open source too.

One small idea might be to add slider bars to adjust the weights. That way,
one can drag these sliders and see the rankings update on the fly. Maybe these
bars (vertical?) can be displayed next to the textbox when user clicks in the
textbox. Or maybe you can place the bars (horizontal) in the right column
where you currently have feedback.

Additional cool features might be the ability to "watch"/receive notifications
for new domain names that satisfy specified weights. Maybe automatically tweet
the user or implement it as an RSS feed.

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jdietrich
Great tool. I have one minor criticism - the domain availability seems to be
just inaccurate enough to be annoying. The first few domains that caught my
eye appeared to be free but were actually taken.

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cmelbye
Somewhat off the main topic: I really like the feedback form, very elegant and
to the point. I think Dropbox does something similar for their feedback. I
might try something like that in my app.

~~~
secos
Went back and looked at the page. I agree, its very elegant and to the point.
Good job!

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nicpottier
Very cool, as someone who has been searching for domains recently I can really
appreciate the functionality.

As for feedback, I think having the text boxes at the top for weighting
treated graphically might be better. Either some up/down or +/- icons to just
tweak those might be cool. (maybe an ajaxy slider that pops up?)

But otherwise dig the concept. +1

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diiq
Seems to be missing some short names --- for instance, while diiq.com and
diiq.org are owned, diiq.net is unclaimed --- but 'diiq' does not appear at
all, despite being four characters long. What qualifies a domain name to
appear in your list?

~~~
jcrocholl
My list is a fairly random sampling of the huge search space of available
domain names. I'm planning to keep adding more names in the future, trying to
strike a balance between good names (short but readable) and more names
(requiring more storage). Fortunately, the App Engine Datastore has linear
complexity for the number of query results, so adding more names doesn't slow
down the searching.

~~~
andrewcooke
i'm surprised that you don't dynamically extend your database if you have a
miss. did you try that? if so, i'm curious why it didn't work out.

~~~
jcrocholl
Because we can't run DNS queries inside Google App Engine. Instead, I query
the DNS results from my home computer and feed them into the datastore using
remote_api.

~~~
andrewcooke
ah, ok (thanks). did you see the recent post here about someone exposing dns
over http? although i have no idea if you could call that either...

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DanBlake
Is there a way to sort out domains with numbers + hyphens in them? I imagine
most people are most concerned with llll.com domains.

~~~
jcrocholl
Yes, you can enter very negative weights in the input boxes for digits
(numbers) and dashes (hyphens). Then these domains will be sorted down to the
end of the list (below the end of the page).

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qeorge
This is fantastic. Otherwise I use freshdrop.net, but this is surfacing good
domains more quickly. Well executed.

~~~
wings
I use freshdrop.net too. There are a lot of domain names on there so here's a
good filter:

    
    
      * exclude all but .com
      * exclude hyphens and numbers
      * set char limit to 12
      * click "Geo" at the top of the page
    

_results right now_ : tipolo.com, treeville.com, umoru.com, etc

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roundsquare
Very cool. Two thoughts:

1) I wouldn't call the numbers you enter into the boxes "scores." They are
really weights - I don't know about others but I got confused by that at
first.

2) Is there a way to substring searches? E.g. If I type in "debate" I might
want "mydebate" to come up...

~~~
jcrocholl
Thank you all for the great feedback!

1) You're right, but the boxes (and columns of numbers) are probably going to
disappear in the next version. Maybe we'll have sliders or radio buttons to
adjust between "Important" and "Don't care" for some properties.

2) Real substring searches are not supported because they are expensive. But
your example is supported: type "debate" in the second keyword input field for
suffix matches.

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seldo
Another useful tool along these lines is <http://domai.nr/>, which searches
all the available TLDs, not just the big 5. However, it expects you to have a
full word in mind rather than suggesting things.

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aristus
use different colors for .com, .net, etc columns.

if it is free, use the black text "free". if it is taken, grey out that cell,
with no text.

that will make it much easier to scan with the eye

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dbz
I like it a lot; however, it seems that if I type, my name, for example (my
actual name) it doesn't check it. It seems like there is a very limited list
of domains? Although I like it so far.

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secos
The scoring mechanism is weird, and not quite intuitive. However, I played
around with it for a few min and it started to make /some/ sense.

Overall, very useful for finding short names.

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bioweek
Why does it say magic.com is free? Or am I doing it wrong?

~~~
jcrocholl
Because magic.com doesn't have an A record. If you click on the "free" link,
the registrar (moniker.com for now) will tell you that it's taken. I know this
is disappointing, but I haven't found a good way to do bulk whois for millions
of names, DNS is much easier.

~~~
compumike
How about doing a DNS lookup but for a SOA record type, instead of an A
record? I'm fairly sure that will either give you a record or an NXDOMAIN.

    
    
      $ dig magic.com SOA
      [snip]
      magic.com.              21600   IN      SOA     auth03.ns.uu.net. hostmaster.uu.net. 990605 21600 3600 1728000 21600

~~~
jcrocholl
That sounds good, I'll look into it.

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tewks
I really like it... it would be great, as I'm sure you know, to tie in
registration.

On that note, who is everyone using for registration these days?

~~~
jhancock
just moved everything from godaddy to namecheap. It was a good bit of work,
but glad to have finished it.

~~~
s3graham
I did the same about a year ago and overall I'm quite pleased. After a year
they're bugging me to renew whois-cloaking thing on namecheap, but orders of
magnitude less irritating than godaddy in all sorts of ways.

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NathanKP
You need better moderation of the suggestion feature along the right. I doubt
you want it saying random garble and things like "gay hot lesbians."

~~~
jcrocholl
You're right. At some point I'm going to start using
<http://getsatisfaction.com/> or think about moderation/filtering. But for now
I really like the direct feedback from users, so I'm going to delete bogus
entries manually from time to time.

~~~
NathanKP
That makes sense. In the meantime it must be frustrating that there are so
many irresponsible people who make more work for you.

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johnl
Was going to suggest a feedback/comment section but I see you already have it.
An excellent way of getting responses from the end user.

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dschobel
Very cool. What is the backend written in?

~~~
jcrocholl
It's written in about 2500 lines of Python, using Django 1.1 (app-engine-
patch) on Google App Engine. Full source code is here:
<http://github.com/jcrocholl/scoretool>

~~~
davepeck
Out of curiosity, why did you settle on app-engine-patch rather than
use_library()?

~~~
jcrocholl
Because app-engine-patch includes more than just a zipped package of Django
1.1. It comes with jQuery, the Blueprint CSS framework, a media generator to
join and minify your CSS and JavaScript, automatic URLs for each app (using
urlsauto.py), and helper functions like ragendja.template.render_to_response
and ragendja.dbutils.get_object_or_404.

~~~
davepeck
Got it. I just wondered if there were standard-Django features you wanted to
use, but couldn't (easily) without AEP. It sounds, however, like it was all
the other in-package goodies that made AEP desirable.

If there were a "GAE django starter project" that included jQuery etc. but
made use of use_library(), would that be interesting?

~~~
jcrocholl
Yes, that would be interesting because the startup time for loading the zipped
Django 1.1 package is significant. Maybe app-engine-patch can be tweaked to
use_library()?

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fauigerzigerk
If you can make it work that would be cool. Currently there are too many
reported free that are actually taken.

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Edinburger
Very nice. I would like to be able to see more results at once.

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lsternlicht
This is very interesting. Where are you sourcing the data from?

~~~
jcrocholl
Some of the names are made up (combinations of letters or short dictionary
words). The expired names are from <http://namejet.com/Pages/Downloads.aspx>
and I'm planning to keep adding more names in the future.

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ardit33
awesome! just bought beltoo.com from it. thanks :)

~~~
jcrocholl
Congratulations to our first customer! Since my post on HN we had 612 hits on
moniker.com, with 1 conversion for $0.31 commission. I also spent $1.60 today
for 22.43 CPU hours on Google App Engine. Almost all of the 17k requests today
were AJAX queries for domain searches.

~~~
nailer
I logged on to see what your application was like, and ended up buying a two-
syllable, two word com and .co.uk domain (not sure how long the registration
process takes) that would be a good project name.

So, yeah, I think your project is great. A couple of things:

* Hire a graphic designer

* Your affiliate hosting company wanted me to enter a US state when paying with my credit card. I entered Armed Forces overseas, it still went through, but it wa annoying

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krav
Just played around with it. Nice work.

