Just Some Bloke

Each day thousands of domain names that have been previously registered expire and become available again. The drop catchers like SnapNames.com and Pool.com publish lists of the names set to drop in the next few days. Being new to the domaining business but an old veteran database developer I decided to build a cool little application to “pan for gold”. Here’s how it works. I created an SSIS package on my database server that wakes up each morning at 5am, downloads the list of expiring domains, and pumps them into a database table. The list is then automatically compared to a group of databases to find the “gems”.

It scans for matches in a semantic English dictionary, a list of all common first and last names from the 1990 US Census, a list of famous people (spidered from Wikipedia), a large database of all populated cities/towns/places around the world, popular product keywords (spidered from a shopping search engine), and a set of keywords that I’m interested in (like Costa Rica). The daily drop file usually contains between 50,000 and 80,000 domain names. My little application has already turned up some great names snatched for the minimum bid on SnapNames and Pool. Keep an eye on my blog for updates on how it’s going. From time to time I’ll post some of the great names I’ve snatched with this tool. I’d love to see some comments from readers on how they sift through the list and find the gems.