Top 10 domain search tools for picking a good domain name

Let's say you want to register a domain name for your blog or your e-commerce store. How do you settle for the best domain name? How do you come up with a domain name that meets all the salient qualities of a good domain name? Should you leave that decision to your web designer? Should your domain name be the same as your business name?

These and many other questions usually flood our minds when we are considering registering a domain - and while this hub may not answer all those questions, at-least it will give you some amazing tools that will make your domain look-up work much easier. And the good thing is that you don't necessarily need to be a web designer for you to use these tools. As you will soon discover, they are very simple to use.

“Okay, i cant wait! Tell me the tools please!”

You will love this tool. Here is how it works, you go to the search bar, type in your desired domain name or your business name and you get some good suggestions that are available for purchase. For instance, I just typed “Rome” (purely random ) and i got a whole lot of suggestions.

What I love about name station is the open id concept for signup. If you are like me, I hate going to a website and having to fill a lengthy signup form. Name station allows you to sign up with your Google account or your facebook account and don’t be afraid when you hear the word signup because its free. So what are you waiting for? Go check it out! Or wait… there are some more tools i want to share…

“What if I want to check for a possible domain name on my IPhone?”

Then Domize is your tool. With domize, you don’t have to wait until you are seated on your computer because by then, the idea that flashed through your mind for a great domain name could just have vanished already. So if you get inspired while on the move, pull out your IPhone and go to domize.
But the ability to load on Iphone is not the only advantage with Domize. Domize is ajax based. If you are a geek or something that borders that, you guessed what that means- it means it loads pretty fast. You just start typing out your desired name and before you can say “desired domain” good old domize has already domized your suggestion into possible available domain names. One other difference it has with the other tools is that it also gives you domain names that have already been registered. That way, you won’t waste your time trying them out. I must also add they have a  crisp and clean website

What if you have more than one name that you want to combine to get a great domain name? Then you should try out bustaname.com. Here is how it works, you enter the first word in the search bar, hit space bar and type the second word and then hit the return key. The tool will return some possible combinations that are available for registration. For instance, lets say you want to begin a tours and travel company in rome and you want to use the Swahili word for tours i.e safaris. Just type “rome safaris” and you will get the results. If there are no good combinations, you can use the option of modifying the domain as suggested. I however don't advise using the hyphen option. One of the  characteristic of a good domain is it shouldn't have hyphens

One of the biggest challenges that online businesses face is when they really need a domain name but it has already been taken. Sometimes, you can convince the person that is currently renting the domain to sell it to you. In fact, there are many “businessmen” who look for possible hot domain names and register them in anticipation that someone will come looking to buy. Almost like real estate huh? Only difference is with real estate, you get a property valuer and you can know If the asking price is a fair deal. What about domain names? Well, at least we have a tool that can give us an estimate. E.g we can know an approximate figure of the daily visits to a domain name. After all traffic is the most important thing here. For example, lets say you wanted to buy facebook (or so you wish), If you enter the URL in the tool, you will know the site has an alexa rank of 2. That means the website has very good traffic. You will also know the website has an approximate traffic of 1-10 million visitors a day. Now you can estimate the value based on the traffic it receives and write Mark Zuckerberg a check.

Have you ever registered a domain then you forgot to pay your renewal fee on time? You probably got an annoying email from your web-host telling you that your account has been suspended, right? Luckily, there is a window within which you can still activate your domain. If however the grace period passes, your domain will be available for anyone else to register. Stuckdomains is a great tool to search through the database of expired domains and you might get one that you really like. Who knows, you might even be lucky to get a domain that you owned once upon a time- and register it again

If you have read my hub on the qualities of a good domain name, you probably know that short domain names are the best. So how do you get a short domain name if you have such a lengthy business name? DYYO is your ultimate short domain name solution. The tool will generate for you four lettered domains basing on the suggestions you give. You tell it what you want in your first letter and your second letter and you get lots of suggestions. You can actually enter what all the four letters you want and you will get the possible available extensions.

As a web designer, there are times I get a client who needs a website but is not sure of the domain name that he/she should register. In such situations, I use what I will call the key word technique. Just think of your niche, come up with some relevant key words and we can use those keywords to get a good domain name. The advantage of this is that the keywords in your domain name wil help you get good ranking in search engines too.

Once you have the relevant key words, go to domain exposer and type in the keywords. domainexposer is one of the most powerful domain search tools. You can specify the length you want, the position of the key word, the string to end with etc.

Whois is another powerful domain search tool. The commonest use for this tool is getting the identity of the owner of a domain. There could be many reasons why you need to know who owns the domain. Maybe you want to contact him/her to see if he/she can sell the domain to you or maybe you are just like the proverbial curious cat. If you are lucky, you will not only get the address but the email and the telephone number as well. Some clever dude did that and got my email about a month ago. He actually confessed his sins in the subject line of his email and that was good because i would have been tempted to spam him.

If you have a list of possible options for your domain name, you want to make your search quick and short. If that is the case,its time to use ajaxwhois for your domain search. The ajax powered search means you get real time suggestions as you type your domain. No wonder their tag line is "We want to make your search for the perfect domain name less irritating!"

The dynamic results are highlighted in two colors for your convenience.  The ones in red are unavailable while the ones in green are available.

You can use this tool if you want to combine the features of whois.sc with the domain search utility. Here is how it works:- you will enter a possible domain name in the search bar and hit the search button. The tool gives you a result of both available and already registered domains. The already registered domains have a whois link which allows you to automatically check who the registrant is.