I think it's a great idea, I haven't tried your tool yet myself (it appears to be the ... Hacker News effect).

I agree with affiliate linking it to godaddy or something - I imagine you would make a lot of money. Also, get it it's own domain and brand it? Or get a web designer to do that for you if you are not into that. I don't really like subdomains, but that's just me.

You could also affiliate link to hosting websites if you don't already.

Another idea - how about make pages of common names? "Viagra" "Spyware" etc? Even hacker, java, whatever maybe a separate page for each of the top 500 searches

And then you could slap some Adsense ads on there. These pages would refresh every 24 hours, and I am sure people would bookmark them and/or subscribe for updates. This way if I was just browsing the site, I might click around between some pages.

The problem I see with advertising is that you can't target it very well ("domain searchers" is broad), but you could if you did it this way.

Even a "startup" tag would work, and you could then affiliate link to amazon to books with startups (or hand pick some for each tag)

These tags might eventually even rank in google, if you made enough of them (make one for every keyword searched, not just the top ones?). Not for spam purposes: for organization.

http://expired-domain.bemmu.com/d/handingover.com

This makes clicking anywhere on the site abhorrently slow too.

Part of this (lack of) speed is that it is hosted in Finland, and running over Telia's network which is running abysmally slow.

New domain, host, and a little styling cleanup should do wonders.

I am not a dev, but I have a few ideas:

- Have a tool that limits the results by the number of characters in the domain

- Quick links on the front page to results starting with each of the 26 letters of the alphabet

- From a revenue standpoint, you could see if there is some sort of affiliate program with registrars, or work something out on your own with a partner firm.

- Add some sort of custom news feed on the front page for domain-related news, SEO, etc.

Currently achievable by editing the Regexp search, though admittedly not user-friendly:

  ^[^.]{4,8}[.](com)$

Also, I haven't had a chance to check it out because it's taking forever to load in my other tab, so I might be missing exactly what it does... but, how about some RSS feeds?

There we go it just loaded... I'm getting a MySQL error on line 105 of index.php.

Any chance you could do some data parsing to give me just the relavent whois info instead of dumping the whole entry into the page?

I do like the idea overall. Expect 51 visits per day now.

1. It's very slow (HN effect?), speed it up 2. Domain Name isn't great 3. I can't jump to a letter via hyperlink 4. I see something called Regex search...what is that? 5. I'd like to see 100 or 500 names per page since there are 256,000+ pages

Honestly, you'll likely never make too much money off ads since the demographic of your audience is technical enough that they probably have an ad blocker installed or they have trained themselves not to click on ads.

Instead of clicking to the whois information, link to some registrar that has an affiliate program.

That way people who find it and like it can be converted to return users? For instance I would be interested in any 2/3 letter domains that become available just for curiosity's sake.

To make it very clear, there are only 4 things you can do to tackle distribution.

1. SEO - Will not work in your case because it typically works best were large amounts of original content is getting generated. (think ugc)

2. SEM - Will again not work in your case because lifetime value of visitor is not much. Plus conversion rates are low with extremely low deal size. (Let me know if any of this is not clear).

3. Widgets - dont think how this will work for you.

4. Go B-to-B - I think this is the best option available for you right now. Essentially offer this as a service to hosting companies and domain registrars. Charge them a usage fees or an ROI rate. But this will require some real world busines development where the rules of the internet do not apply. If your tool is good, it could also be a nice little acquisition target.

The compilation, repackaging, dissemination or other use of this Data is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of VeriSign.

You have no built-in marketing, and no high-profit-per-user monetization to justify any expense to acquire visitors.

You could built a big SEO-net with themed lists of expiring domain names and go with a snapnames sort of model ("pay is $10 to monitor this domain name and we'll register it FOR FREE if it comes available")... That'd get you $10 and you could resell for a cheap registrar and make a nice margin if the names came available. You could even send them other names via email ("You're watching technology.com - here are 20 other similar domain names you might want to monitor/snatch up").

Still, commodity biz with little innovation ops, IMO.

It has been suggested that you add in link counts. My understanding is that the search engines, at least google, tries to discount links received prior to a change in ownership so I'm not sure this would be useful from a SEO standpoint. If you're interested in natural clickthroughs then it may also make sense to add in alexa/compete traffic stats.

The regexp gives a lot of power but many people have problems constructing them. I don't suppose there is a WYSIWYG editor for regexp is there? I would certainly take that form out to a page of its own and add a cheatsheet. I really don't think linking out to wikipedia is the right solution. Provide your users exactly what they need and no more.

You need some way of encouraging users to return. Subscription to a regexp search has been suggested. Weekly featured domain might also work. Email and rss would be good. Might also be useful to have a tell a friend function though the audience is probably wrong for this to work.

It would be good to be able to construct more complex sorts. Deleted and part of speech for example.

Basically, your pitching a spoon to dig a hole, when the problem is solved better by an Earth mover.

Now, that isn't all bad, because noobies are better ad clickers anyway, but I doubt the tool would ever get much widespread usage (sorry!), and the effort to make it so is not going to be worth the return.

I think you've highlight the core issue yourself though. You approached us and got some interest. Unless you engage with communities getting love back is unlikely.

You should be actively looking for people with this problem and giving them the solution. The more you do, the more it will spread until it's self-sustaining.

I think you've highlight the core issue yourself though. You approached us and got some interest. Unless you engage with communities getting love back is unlikely.

You should be actively looking for people with this problem and giving them the solution. The more you do, the more it will spread until it's self-sustaining.

Because of the mysql errors I cannot use your application either so I'll hold judgement on actual functionality for now.

On another technical aspect I notice you're passing regexes via GET. Don't - setup an array of regexes with named keys (e.g. default => ^[^.]+[.](com)$) - I'm about to test to see how much damage I could theoretically do (without too much effect if possible). I hope you're not using that in an SQL statement.

Edit: Ah didn't notice it was a feature as such - while it's a pwoerful feature it's not very user-friendly. Perhaps create a search form that works similarly?

Issues aside it looks like an interesting tool - an additional sort could be to pick up domains that are single dictionary words, and then further sort those by number of syllables.

Many potential users may struggle to figure out regexps.

goodlookingnames com

thenameforme com

namesnomsg com

start charging for it, or at the very least make clicking on the domains take you to a godaddy affiliate link or something