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I've built out a pet project of mine, and am now looking for a good domain name for it. Arbitrarily doing whois lookups on ideas that pop into my head seems inefficient.

What tools do you use when searching for a good domain name?

Some ideas to get the wheels greased :

  • given a few letters does prefix/suffix/infix searches for available domains
  • suggests other words from a thesaurus
  • shows you short available domains

And of course, another requirement is that the tool isn't shady and quickly registers the domain name while it searches for you.

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  • I'm not going to downvote because it's not a bad question, but c'mon - you're after a cybersquatting tool, which opens quite a few legal issues these days. In Australia cybersquatting is quite illegal, don't know about other countries.
    – Mark Henderson
    Jul 23, 2009 at 4:12
  • I tend to agree with you Farseeker but we do need to remember that while it's illegal here in Oz it's not illegal in some other places. Besides, we're sysadmins, not lawyers.
    – John Gardeniers
    Jul 23, 2009 at 4:51
  • Very true. I believe I've seen the acronym SFANL or something, Server Fault Are Not Lawyers...
    – Mark Henderson
    Jul 23, 2009 at 5:50
  • Honestly, I don't want to cybersquat. I hate those people just as much as you do. I just want a good name for my pet project. Some searching turned up nameboy.com which isn't too bad. I'm just looking for similar things.
    – Paul Tarjan
    Jul 23, 2009 at 10:04

7 Answers 7

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May not be a complete solution -- but, try Domize.com

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I enjoy playing around with AjaxWhois. It doesn't fit your search criteria at all, and I don't know about the shadiness, but it's damned fun to use!

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  • this is not bad. but domize is similar and does it better. fyi. :)
    – Eric Johnson
    Feb 7, 2011 at 1:20
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In the interest of avoiding auto-parking of your queries, I recommend that you do a simple nslookup of www.name.tld and then go to your respected registrar when you're ready to purchase it and verify that it is free.

Can't help much in the way of tools, though. I usually look them up by hand, and if I'm looking for a prefix or substring, I'll whip up a little shell script to search the name space for me.

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Most registrar sites I've seen have that kind of functionality. Enter a name you're interested in and they pop up a whole bunch of alternatives. If you need more than that I'm inclined to agree with Farseeker's comment.

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Another good site for finding domain names is http://www.bustaname.com They allow you to combine pre- and post- fixes, creating word lists, and only show results that are still open.

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I just script nslookups, then when I have a list of possibles I throw them into a registrar's form, like gandi.net.

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  • You can submit up to 50 domains in one go on gandi.net
    – Eric Johnson
    Feb 7, 2011 at 1:22
  • Yeah having a real variety of options in one click is great. Fifty should be enough for candidate names for a project/product.
    – dlamblin
    Aug 5, 2011 at 7:32
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I found mine after looking up synonyms for words associated with my project on http://thesaurus.reference.com/ and checking the domains on my registrar.

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