January 17, 2006
No Good Name Left Untarred
The conventional wisdom is that all the good single-word dot coms are all gone. Generally when I hear that, I pull a word out of my hat, zip over to GoDaddy and see if it’s available as a dot com. Generally it is not.
But the other day I thought “Hmmm. There are nice big dictionaries of English words freely available on the net, and as a Perl Dude™ I can leverage this to let me find out just exactly which words are taken and which are not.” So that’s what I’m doing.
My makeshift script takes a somewhat reformatted version of the AGID word list (AGID: Automatically Generated Inflection Database, available as a zip or tarball here), sticks .com on the end of each word, and sends it up the flagpole.
The script is running now, and having checked just over 72,000 words out of a total of over 282,000, it’ll be running for some time. But for those readers inclined to statistical modelling, here’s how they’re shaping up so far:
| total | registered |
|---|---|
| 78,399 | 54.44% |
Of the 35,719 or so single-word dot coms still available, here is a random sample:
borodinos.com
titanosauri.com
westernizing.com
complects.com
maldons.com
linnaei.com
adenopathyes.com
yucatecs.com
cassonades.com
haematoxylum.com
More to come: I reckon this script will finish sometime tomorrow afternoon, at which point we can figure out whether your favorite word is already spoken for.
PS. although my script hasn’t checked it yet, I note that untarred.com is available. Have at it!
Filed by Joel at 4:26 pm under Web Development, Web Marketing
Way to go, brother. Now everyone knows our secret plan for global domination.
Or do they?
Wait till they get a load of our completely folksonomic taxonomy.
Well, maybe I did give a way “untarred.com”, but at least I didn’t tell them about “retarred.com.”