I am pleased to release Web2Names, a little toy to help you find a domain name. It does some tricky stemming on your search term to help find nearby words. Try searching on iphone (I kinda like “iphoni.es” and “iphoned.org”.)

implementation details

The site caches results very aggressively, because querying nameservers for scores of domains at a time is slow. It uses dig ns for the lookups, which means it occasionally returns false negatives (saying a domain is available when it really isn’t) if a site’s DNS configuration is completely hosed.

Web2Names is a Camping app. It is deployed behind Apache 2.2 with multiple load-balanced mongrels. It doesn’t use a database. Instead it uses Manfred Stienstra’s page cache library.