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Show HN: Namealong – Domain search that pairs your query with 4114 other words (namealong.com)

7 points by simantel ↗ HN
Namealong takes your query, pairs it up with 4000+ other words, suffixes, and prefixes, and shows you available .com domains by checking the ICANN zone file.

That's fast, but semi-inaccurate, so when you hover over or click on domain names, an additional WHOIS check is done to verify availability.

If this all sounds familiar, Lean Domain Search used to do this exact same thing, but earlier this year they added .blog domains to the search results with no way to filter them out, making the tool basically useless for .com searches.

11 comments

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simantel
Let me know if you have any feedback or feature ideas!
tamimio
Add a filter option to know which domain is available and which is not.
simantel
Yeah, the false positives are annoying, but this is the best balance of speed and accuracy I could think of. The only way to guarantee availability is a WHOIS lookup, which takes 50ms+ per domain, so to check thousands of options would take minutes.

I'm adding a cache of the WHOIS results though, so will hopefully be able to filter a lot more of the false positives from the initial search results in the future.

tamimio
> but this is the best balance of speed and accuracy

Well, you don’t need to load them all at once, make lazy load, every 10 loaded once.

> The only way to guarantee availability is a WHOIS lookup, which takes 50ms+ per domain,

I remember I used a site before that check domains in the fly and it was fast, it didn’t load everything at once so probably that’s the trick.

tamimio
Actually on a second thought, I think it’s good like this as long as you can check availability on a click, much better it seems to see all domains at once than going on endless pages! Thanks!
KomoD
> when you hover over or click on domain names, an additional WHOIS check is done to verify availability

This causes so many duplicate requests, like 5+ per domain

simantel
Interesting. The check should only be done once on hover (even if you mouseover multiple times) and then again on click, so I'll have to investigate.
KomoD
I'm on chrome, if that helps.
simantel
So I was re-triggering the request if multiple mouseover events fired before a result came back. I just deployed a fix!