Often when we talk about domain names and startups, it’s in terms of selecting a good one. Having a good name for your startup may not be the key to your success, but it’s still a critical piece and you certainly do want to choose wisely. The advice around picking a name is worth repeating, because you don’t want to be stuck with a lousy name: Avoid long or impossible-to-remember names. Brainstorm and vet your ideas with friends (particularly those who know nothing about your service or product). And finally – and this may be the most important part – make sure the domain name is available and if there are similarly named sites already.
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This is all likely common knowledge. But here’s one more tool to add your arsenal if you’re looking for or thinking about domain names: AddedDomains.com. This tool offers a different sort of insight than simply whether or not a name is available. Rather, it shows you who else has recently registered a similarly named domain.
The site was created by the same folks who run FormDs.com, which as the name suggests, tracks Form D filings. And AddedDomains does something along those lines too, tracking the dot com domain names that have been registered every day.
The data comes from the 200 million line Verisign master file. Even though it may seem as though all the good dot com names are taken, there are still about 100,000 new ones registered every day.
The site features an instant search capability, and you can sign up for email notifications for terms. The backend for the site powers a product for investors in VeriSign stock, a dataset of over 8 GB of information that gets processed each day. (If you’re interested in looking at this data yourself, you can sign a contract with Verisign to get access to the data here.)
Robert Hunt, the person behind the site, says he plans on adding some new visualizations soon, particularly around clustering and changing trends over time.
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