I'm thrilled to officially announce the launch of a new section on Lean Domain Search that focuses exclusively on brandable domain names. Unlike keyword based domain names (think PostHaven, GitHub, etc), brandable domain names do not have a specific meaning and therefore can be applied to a wide variety of websites (think Google, Mozilla, etc).
If you'd like to skip the background you can head straight over to it by clicking on the Brandable link in the navigation bar or clicking here:
Visit the new Brandable Domain Names section
Background
On January 30, 2009 I launched my first web app, Domain Pigeon, on HackerNews. It looked something like this:
Like this new feature of Lean Domain Search, Domain Pigeon helped you find brandable .com domain names. Later, I expanded to include Twitter names as well.
The site did remarkably well and was even written about on ReadWriteWeb, a milestone that I did not appreciate until much later.
The funny thing is that I never thought Domain Pigeon was very good. My original intent was to build what Lean Domain Search now is. I wanted you to be able to type in a term, have Domain Pigeon pair your term with other keywords, and quickly show you which were available. At the time though I was relatively inexperienced as a web developer and didn't know how to build a tool that could do that (it's pretty hard to do fast, bulk domain search). Instead, I settled on generating brandable domain names and that became Domain Pigeon.
I worked on it for a few months but eventually lost interest, shut it down, and moved on to Preceden, my second web app, which I launched about a year later in January 2010.
Domain Pigeon 2.0, aka Lean Domain Search
As I became a better developer, I slowly picked up the skills I needed to build that fast bulk domain search tool. In the fall of 2011 I started working on what would become Lean Domain Search, eventually launching in January 2012.
For its entire existence Lean Domain Search has been focused on helping you find quality keyword-based domain names.
However, I always wanted to go back to its roots and build out a section for finding brandable domain names. With today's launch, I'm happy to say that that's now a reality.
Brandable Domain Names Section
There are a few quick things I want to point out and then you can play around with it:
One new domain name is released at the top of every hour. At the time of this writing there are 183 domain names, 15 of which have already been registered (8%). I expect that percentage to go up as more people learn about it.
New domain names appear at the top of the list, but you can also sort by length or alphabetically.
Confirming a domain name's availability. Like the keyword search, you can click on a domain name to confirm that it is still available. If it comes back as registered it will turn pink for you and all future visitors.
You can favorite domain names that you're interested in. After you confirm that a domain name is available you can click on the star next to it's name to mark it as as a favorite (it will turn yellow).
That's about it for now. Love it? Hate it? I'd love to get your thoughts in the comments or by email: matt@leandomainsearch.com.
Thanks!