The del.icio.us style domain names are neat for a personal site or something, but they're not very memorable (in terms of spelling and remembering where the dots are), and thus not good for a commercial site. Even Delicious ended up coughing up the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for delicious.com.

Edit: also, this tool isn't very accurate, it reports lots of domains as available when they really aren't.

Agree on the accuracy issue, tried 3 different domains, all showed as available and none were.

I have used instantdomainsearch.com in the past with some success for tld's, roughly similar idea but has been around for a long time.

Me too.

Just to test it out, I entered in my name (zain). It suggested http://za.in/ and said it was available. I was ecstatic!

But, sadly, no, it was wrong. "whois za.in" says NOT FOUND, but I can't find a single .in registrar who says it is available. Bummer.

I also used to think along this lines. But then i tried to remember when was it last that i had physically entered a domain name in the browser - rarely i do that! Mostly i get it from bookmarks or through web surfing links. So i feel the names are less important than the content at that name.

But personally i like "neat and clean" (i.e. dotless) names vs those force-segmented ones. Also dotless names have the advantage of browsers filling in for the www and .com !

I found http://wh.at is available, to register from GoDaddy - that says it's an invalid domain name. :(

g.com is available

Thanks for the kind words on the UI. We spent a lot of time on that. I guess you could say we were inspired by Google Maps—they got the UI right first, then fixed the incomplete data, bad directions and brought it up to feature parity with Yahoo and MapQuest.

This is a killer interface. If it gets the behind the scenes stuff problems, others have already mentioned here, taken care of, it will get used a lot.

^ Ditto, I was very impressed at the interface (if not at the problems with getting domain names that I couldn't register).

I'm rooting for you guys.

How about a more descriptive headline? You would probably get a lot more clicks if you gave people at least a hint about what is behind this link. If submitters can't take an extra few seconds to write a few descriptive words why should anyone take the time to look at what they've posted? I was tempted to flag this before I saw how many comments are here.

I don't know anyone who would be on HN and NOT understand what a website called domainr does...

Fine. You could say it obviously has something to do with domain names. But, what exactly? Why should I bother using Domainr instead of searching using my preferred registrar? Surely, there must be something compelling enough to warrant such a site in the first place. It's pretty thin if it has to be sold with only a lame, cliche name. Is it too much to ask for at least a descriptive sentence fragment?

whats http://is.ydnar.in ?

ydnar appears to be "randy" backwards.

"Ydnar is in 'America' but not in 'Spam' - what is ydnar?"

I don't get it either...

"Find ydnar anywhere!" ??

could be "easy dinar (the Gulf currency)" !

There's really no benefit in having the message "This domain might be available". It is either available or it isn't (at the time you displayed the message anyways).

Nice, but too many "This domain’s availability is unknown".

Yeah - I'm not sure, but that seems to be when the registrar only allows third level domains (e.g. Australia only allows .com.au/.net.au/etc - you can't register blah.au)...

Nice, but it kept telling me domains are available when they weren't

ve/ry clev.er

Don't really see the "rip", but as far as simple web designs go, everyone copies everyone else. How many variations of a banner/sidenav/main/footer layouts can you really do?