Friday, August 7, 2009

Quickly find domains in expire or drop lists

This is an unpaid review of a PERL script utility to find all 1 and 2 word domains from lists of expired or dropped domains. The script is being offered for sale on the NamePros.com Domain Name forums.

REVIEW:
-I downloaded PERL and installed it on my PC. This took a little while but worked without any problem. Keep in mind that you then have another scripting environment that could be used by viruses or Trojans if they are set up to look for it.

-In looking at the script, I see that it expects the domains to be in domains.txt and the dictionary to be in dictionary.txt.

-The recommended dictionary default name is fulldictionary00.txt so you have to rename that or the script so it will work.

-The dictionary is very large and about 2.6MB in size, but it may be missing many words that you might want find, like "domainer" and "domaining". This is why I asked for a list of all the domains where no words were found so I can look for new ones to add to the dictionary. I assume that I can add things like "domainname" to the dictionary and the script will treat that as one word and find them for me? I will test and see how that works.

- Clicking on the script just opens it for editing, so I right-click and select "open with" and found the PERL command line option and used that. The script ran without problem from what I can tell.

-OMG! I just processed a file with 118,201 domains that dropped today. I opened up the Windows clock so I could time how fast it ran and in looking at the command line window I missed how long it took but it was not more than 10 seconds!!! This is freaky fast and should run well on even a 500MHZ PC.

-Ok, it's fast, but is it really any good...??? Here are the resultant files it generated:

1word.txt               1kb     96 domains
2word.txt               92kb    11,054 domains
2wordh.txt              4kb     440 domains (domains with 2 words and a hyphen)
other.txt               951kb   92,407 domains (domains where none of the above were found.)


- If you add things like "domainname" to the dictionary, it will find domains like "DomainnameResell.com", but it would add the domain "Domainname.com" to the list of 1-word domains if you do that.

- In looking at the list of domains that it didn't find anything for, I spotted the domain "OrlandoBlacklist.com". The word "blacklist" is in the dictionary, but not the word "Orlando". Since the word "schenectady" is also missing I assume that no city, state, or country names are included. So those interested in GEO domains and other special topics will have to add them, but it's a simple text file and will be easy.
Question: if I add words, do they have to be in alphabetical order?

[Summary: This inexpensive script works as advertised, and it works QUICK! This lets you spend hours pouring over the best possibilities for expired domains, find ones that are unregistered, and then get them for regfee. I would like to see the author offer a version/upgrade that will find 3-word and 4-word domains for those that are interested in them.
 
You can also add to the list of words it will find. I plan on adding my name and other special, secret, trendy, and new made-up words so that I can REMEMBER to look for them and also find them quickly. You could also use this application to let you know when specific domains drop, much like the Domain Monitor ad DomainTools.com works. Just add the entire domain as a word, like "freecadcamsoftware" and if that domain is in the list, it will be pulled out and added to the 1-word list.

If you need a powerful tool to save a lot of time looking for good potential domains from lists of dropped or expired domains, this will serve you will. Disclaimer: I paid full price for my copy and have not, nor will I receive anything for writing this review. ]