We tech people love our domains. A domain is your stake in the world, a physical token of something that might exist, an exciting project waiting to be developed. Cool domains are cool.

Buying a new domain for an idea you have is nice, but what I like even more is to look through expired domains. I find it romantic in a way: someone had an idea, or there was a business that existed 25 years ago, they worked on it, but time did its work and the domain fell into disuse and was released. Maybe the person stopped caring, maybe the company went out of business. It’s like the turning of the seasons. Now, like a nice stick on a beach, you can pick it up and wave it around.

As the best source of inspiration I like the aptly named ExpiredDomains most of all. It’s completely free (you only need to register), has millions of domains and works quickly.

Below are some filters I use most. All are for .com domains because I’m only interested in them. When new TLDs started appearing, I couldn’t resist and bought yk.wtf because it was very short, cheap and fun — I now use it for my personal blog.

Just a note: if you want to find great domains, you need a domain market. Looking through expired domains is like picking up apples that fell on the ground: they may be good but nobody else wanted them. Still, you can find if not diamonds, then nickel-plated items in there, and possibly something that nobody else wanted but that’s perfect just for you because it has a personal meaning.

  1. Oldest available, new in the last 60 days, sorted by WHOIS date. Usually starting in 1996, this list is a fun way to look at what was popular almost 30 years ago. A lot of mentions of CDs, the year 2000, cyber, calls and other things that went completely out of date.
  2. Shortest available, with hyphens but no numbers, sorted by length. Most are gibberish, but if you just need a four-letter .com domain, why not? It’s here that I’ve found dat-a.com that I now use for a Mastodon instance.
  3. All available, no hyphens, sorted by drop date. Here you’ll see what dropped recently and there’s a chance to see some good ones. This is the filter where I got SciFiWriters.com (where I want to do a project).

Enjoy browsing!

Below are are just a few domains that I starred while browsing because they seemed appealing (I have about 200 stars in total). At the time of writing (October 2024), all are available.

  • corkrs.com. Perfect for Rust conference in Cork? .rs domains are mighty expensive.
  • jazzsanfran.com. First registered in 1998. I’d read about the history of jazz in San-Francisco on this website.
  • descent3d.com. A fan site for the game Descent which was truly 3D with 6 degrees of freedom. I used to play it a lot.
  • ibebop.com. I stumbled upon this yesterday and thought it would be cool for a full course on sound generation in WASM, like building a synth on the web, all the way from sine waves to the music theory of bebop. I’d buy it in a heartbeat.
  • SymbolComputer.com. This is just funny, an echo of Symbolics.
  • SlicesOfCS.com. I thought this could be a page similar to TeachYourselfCS.com.
  • cyberknits.com. Sweaters with retro tech motives, yeah? That would be cool.
  • krisiskontrol.com and katklaws.com. Both marked registered in 1998, these to me seem emblematic of the period, as if lifted from Hackers.
  • TheBusinessHoroscopes.com. Registered in 1999. I thought this would be a fun LLM-generated experience that would tell you that you’d find a gem on Confluence today, and a cold call you needed to make today would bring prosperity. I don’t have a single idea why someone would have registered this domain.
  • RustRap.com. Rust rap. Enough said. Registered in 2001.

There’s a guy on Twitter who buys promising domains and nurtures them into businesses. That’s inpiring. I don’t have the commitment to follow through but it’s pleasant to look at what might be.