🧁 Algorithm Update
I had the small idea to make a list of domain names that are exactly one English word and end with the TLD ‘.com’. And so I make it, it lives here: https://www.muffin-company.com/word-domains
And I posted on a forum about domain names: https://www.namepros.com . It is wild there is a forum about buying and selling domain names, the internet is a wild place. Anyway I got asked a question about if I found any interesting domain names and so I looked in the DB and looked for the shortest available domain names. The three I posted were:
doing.com
unnear.com
unsmug.com
And I got the feedback that doing.com is not available. So what went wrong?
The current algorithm did:
host doing.com # See if there is a DNS response for the domain name
whois doing.com # Check for a whois recordAnd I think for this domain name the whois lookup failed in some way and the algorithm thought the doing was available when it wasn’t.
So I made the following update:
host doing.com # Same
curl -I https://rdap.verisign.com/com/v1/domain/doing.com # Make an HTTP request to see if the domain is taken or notAnd I hope this is more reliable. RDAP is a newer protocol (vs whois) but it works well for ‘.com’ domains.
I am still learning a lot about domain names but I am glad it was pretty easy to update the system and I will spot check some domain names over time.
Till next time,