

Show HN: Sift through recently dropped .com's in order of pronounceability, etc. - lolkittens
http://www.swola.com

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etfb
OK, that's a good start, but I hope you're devoting a fair amount of effort to
improving your decision algorithm. At the moment, it considers tretz.com to be
60% pronounceable, but llmyw.com, qenis.com and domyh.com to be 100%. I can
kind of see how a naive algorithm would calculate that, and I'm pretty sure
you can tweak it to make it better. Bonus points for using some sort of neural
net or Bayesian technique to improve scores, perhaps with a button next to the
score to allow people to adjust it.

~~~
mrmaddog
Doing a naive dictionary lookup would also help your algorithm, i.e.
limoship.com should rank higher than leonadare.com in my opinion. Cool website
though! I've always wondered how often decent domain names lapsed.

~~~
verroq
I'm fairly sure _qenis_ 's high ranking is the result of using Levenshtein
distance on dictionary words. You want phonetics based analysis instead. Then
again _qenis_ isn't that hard to pronounce either, so I don't know.

~~~
s_henry_paulson
queenis... kewnis... kenis... Yeah, I don't know about that.

~~~
sejje
None of those are hard to pronounce. Not knowing which pronunciation to use is
secondary.

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PanMan
I quite like the idea. However, of the about 10 domains I checked (5 letter
ones), only one was available. You probably should use a different, more
reliable, way of checking for availability?

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RileyJames
Great site, excellent idea. If you want to make this useful to slightly larger
audience you could add pagerank and backlink information for the domains.
Pagerank is simple enough to determine (libraries will check it against the
google toolbar). For backlinks you can easily create a link to reports on
majesticseo.com or a similar service.

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thomaslutz
Great idea, how do you find recently dropped domains?

~~~
binarysolo
Would love to know this too -- and am curious how the players in the market
end up snatching these sites.

~~~
thinkdevcode
Check my reply to the article as I provide a source for domain lists.

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wrath
Very cool and useful. Could be very useful once you add keyword search and
more filtering. Good job.

I have a somewhat off-topic question. How do you get access to these domain
names?

~~~
maayank
Posted the question to StackOverflow[1]. Debated with myself whether to post
there or Server Fault, but here we are. Maybe it will be closed by the-powers-
to-be as I'm not sure of the focus (I do want a programmable solution, i.e. an
API)

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12954630/how-does-one-
pro...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12954630/how-does-one-
programmatically-find-newly-available-domains)

~~~
timkly
I've done a little bit of domaining myself and the first thing to take away
from any list is that recently dropped doesn't always equal available. Also
you have guys that are running massive lists that perform thousands of buys
requests per second across a massive number of domain name sellers in order to
ensure they get to purchase the domain as soon as its released.

In terms of obtaining information, most whois queries can be performed via
command line utilities... so to start you off here is a good list for whois
servers (<http://code.google.com/p/whois-servers-list/>). Finally, check out
each service, some will allow queries which will return true or false to being
registered and generally you get a lot more of these requests then complete
lookups (without being IP blacklisted)

Finally, in terms of building and managing an index, I believe manual crawling
is the only option available... and start with dictionary terms and work out.

Edit: Read this as well - [http://www.dotweekly.com/pending-delete-domain-
name-drop-lis...](http://www.dotweekly.com/pending-delete-domain-name-drop-
lists/)

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thinkdevcode
To everyone looking for expiring/dropping domain lists, ive been building an
app called dropparser that uses a free source (though I dont see it being
mentioned in here yet). Some python code for you:

    
    
      domain_file_url = "http://www.odditysoftware.com/download/dldoms.php?domdate=
    
      def today():
          return str(datetime.date.today())
    
      def get_raw_domain_file():
          return urllib2.urlopen(domain_file_url + today()).read()

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thomasgd
Great idea ! However, I have a problem : let's say I want all the domains
starting with the letter "C" with 10 characters max. It says me "Limit of 1500
results reached. Narrow your search parameters to view more results", but
there is no way for me to narrow my search parameters while still obtaining
the domains starting with the letter "C" with 10 characters max. Anybody has a
hint, or is this an error ?

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mikeknoop
You can force it to show 4-letter domains
<http://www.swola.com/index.php?limit=4> but none are actually available, they
just don't have DNS records.

<http://instantdomainsearch.com> has this same problem when deciding if a
domain is actually available or not.

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mrspeaker
Nice work - It's very effective: I went to buy like, 3 of the domains. Then
realised I had no need for them and put my credit card away!

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jeromegn
Just bought punypic.com with it. Thought it was a cool name. No idea what to
do with it (except the usual image hosting service)

~~~
minikomi
Picnics for toddlers

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ollysb
More useful than pronouncibility would be spellability. I'd score domains with
only a single spelling as higher e.g. twang.com over base.com (bass.com). To
do this the algorithm would just need to scan for graphemes that share a
common phoneme with other graphemes and weight those lower.

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tocomment
Would this be a good way to name a startup or product?

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geelen
This is so pro. I don't mind that the algorithm's a little wonky, or the
availability isn't quite right, it's just a sweet little mashup.

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w33ble
Pretty neat. I ended up grabbing a domain, now I need to figure out a project
for it.

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pppggg
babymail.com : you site says expired on 10/14/12 . However,
[http://who.godaddy.com/whois.aspx?domain=babymail.com&pr...](http://who.godaddy.com/whois.aspx?domain=babymail.com&prog_id=GoDaddy)

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bwood
I'm not getting a scrollbar on your site...is that deliberate?

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hayksaakian
Site renders like ass on my phone, galaxy nexus, both in terms of speed and
appearance.

~~~
abootstrapper
Another way to say this could be, "The site does not render well..." That
would take the edge off your criticism, and be a more polite way to help your
fellow hacker.

