Finding a New Domain Name
Ryan Stout has built a great tool to help in that increasingly difficult task of finding a suitable domain name for a new site.
Called Bust a Name it has a nice JavaScript interface with a rails, MySQL and lighttpd backend.
Primarily a word combiner, once you have entered your words you can select similar words from a drop down list. You can sort available domains by length, readability or alphabetically. A really useful feature is that you can group keywords so that keywords in the same group are not combined. Other options allow a limited number of suffixes and prefixes with an additional checkbox to pluralize or drop the last vowel.
Using this tool I have found that augmenting the similar word feature with a thesaurus and finding additional keywords to input with Google’s Keyword Tool helps a lot in finding usable domain names.
frankmedia said,
September 13, 2007 @ 8:25 am
It is worth mentioning another site called abramex where you can find search engine friendly words.
Abramex research the most demanded keywords and keyphrases related to your target keywords. For each keyphrase shows the number of searches per month and a number of synonyms which you can immediately check then and there.
To give you a sense of how big the problem is, according to the Language Monitor, there are an astonishing 850,000 words in English (compared to fewer than 100,000 in French). But there are over 30 million domain names under .COM alone. That means that there are 35.24 domain names for every word in the English language.
As you can imagine, you probably won’t have much luck finding a domain name that will match exactly an English word. But can still find great domain names because we put lots of effort building a search engine that finds them for you.
duz said,
September 13, 2007 @ 5:59 pm
Frank I am not sure that Abramex was working as intended when I tried it. If I put in ‘domain name’ I get:
Result for : domain name
Yahoo! suggestions
domain name registration
free domain name
domain name renewal
register domain name
domain name search
domain name system
buy domain name
domain name services
domain name registrar
domain name transfer
Are you suggesting that these keyphrases are then entered into ‘Bust a Name’?
hssiegel said,
February 12, 2008 @ 8:14 pm
There is software I have heard about that tells you how a domain name ranks against a datablase of domains with their search engine rankings.
It supposedly scores the domain against the others to tell you how well your domain name will do.
It’s called Nemeas. Has anyone used this or heard of anyone using this software?