Finding a good domain name is really hard. When you have a great idea for a website; the first thing you do is rush to a registrar and attempt to buy the perfect domain for it. Naturally, your first choice it’s taken. Don’t worry though; you had a couple of backup names just in case, right? But they’re taken too. Damn. A search for .org and .net variants yield similar results. Before you begin the requisite cursing, check out Domainr.
Domainr is a domain name search engine. You can type any domain or text string into the search box and Domainr will automatically check the availability of all domains related to your input. It will check top-level domains, international domains and even generate domain hacks.
Nothing is perfect
Domainr is incredibly helpful, but it suffers from a bunch of really irritating issues. Most annoyingly, it sometimes displays impossible domain names in its results. This includes extensions that cannot be registered outside the country that operates it, extensions that are yet to be approved by ICANN and domain names that are too short.
Other stuff up their sleeve
Domainr have apps for Google Chrome, Windows Phone and iOS available, which means you can go domain hunting when you’re on the go. Unsurprisingly, Android users miss out.
Thanks for the shout-out, Shane!
Re: the irritating issues, one of our top product goals for Domainr has always been comprehensiveness, to show what is possible in the domain namespace. It turns out that there are proxy services for many restricted country domains, as well.
Re: domains that are too short, let us know when you see these bugs and we’ll fix them — we found that some registrars allow for short (like 1-2-character) domains, while others have a 3-char minimum. Super-annoying, and unfortunately we have to fix these manually. :/
Re: the new yet-to-be-approved TLDs, we chose to include these in our search results to get people thinking about the possibilities for when they will someday be approved. We’ve also partnered with a registrar that is already accepting pre-registrations for some of the new TLDs.
Thanks again for the post, and feel free to email us (ping@domai.nr) if you have any other questions about the service.
Cheers,
-Eric
Hi Eric, thank you for stopping by and taking the time to explain the reasoning behind the issues.
While I can see the benefit of showing the yet-to-be-approved TLD’s, I still find it irritating. I type something in and think “wow! what a great domain” only to find it doesn’t exist yet. The registrars are partly to blame too; they always have a friendly message along the lines of “Yeah! You can totally register that domain! Soon. Maybe. Or maybe not… we’re not sure”
Again; great service and all the best for your continued (and deserved) growth and praise.