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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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?
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.
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
name.com is really good. free private whois, and the interface is really great compared to something like godaddy. they do exactly what i want them to do and nothing more.
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
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.
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?
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()?
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.
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.
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
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.