Have you tried pcnames.com? It's the best tool I've found for searching domain names ( and thanks to VanGogh for discovering it ). It's an ajax application, so you start typing, and it will search to see whether what you typed is available as .com, .net, .info, and a few others, plus suggest a few almost random domains that include your input.
Since we're talking about domain names, know that when people search for something that's part of yours, you come up much higher in the search. I just registered Seattle-Portraits.com for a portrait service I'm starting, because it will do better than my given name when people search for "portraits in Seattle" or something like it. The downside is someone else has SeattlePortrait.com, so I'll loose a lot of type-in traffic to her ... in fact I'll wind up advertising for her. I think most of my traffic will come from the net, though, so it's not a big problem.
The reason I bring my own story up isn't to bore you; people don't even consider putting dashes in their domain name. It's really hard to find a good domain that doesn't have a hyphen and is less than about 20 words. If you use them, there's a whole world of .coms left, and you get the added benefit of telling Google where one word ends and the next starts. So it's worth thinking about. |
