Very creative way of finding names. This is the type of stuff I like seeing rather than the 'OMG SQUATTERS RUINING INTERWEBS' bs. Good for you.

Pool.com sends out an email of their "Hot List" every day with a list of expiring domains (http://www.pool.com/hotlist.aspx?ia=hotlist). They send about 30 domains a day, and I guess in an average week 5 are interesting and you can register for them at the various auction sites (Pool has no guarantee of getting them on the drop) and then bid on them. Very few domains that are usable go for less than $100 though.

Not as good as Ryan's AI but a nice easy way to occasionally catch a good domain.

Another good site for expired names is http://www.snapnames.com/

Excellent idea. After spending 8+ hours trying to come up with a good name only to then find it was taken, it would be far quicker to instead be able to go through the non-taken names and see what pops out. Also good for starting the brainstorming process rather than just staring at a blank page or going through all the "positioning" and branding tactics for name generation.

I'm curious what type of names you were looking for - I'm not actively searching for a name for a new business, but I come up with ideas for names all the time and end up buying them just because they're decent and available. I get that the "real word" options are becoming less common, but I personally haven't had that much trouble finding them. My problem? Now I just own a bunch of domains that I'm not really sure what to do with.

MMmmm.... Yes and no. I remember the first time I heard of google, that probably wouldn't have been a highly valued domain at the time.

What really matters is links. You can put whatever you want in a link, since most people don't look at them too much.

That's a good point. Interesting enough 'google' has a high score when run through my algorithm. There are a lot of words that start with 'goo' and end with 'ogle'.

Ryan, IMO this idea itself is worth pursuing as a service/company given the difficulties in finding a good domain name. Its not going to get any easier going forward .. looking forward your next steps on this. Great post btw!

very clever. why don't you turn this into a service? if you have no interest, send me the code and I'll do it. :-)

I would love to just see pseudocode for how it works in a little more detail

Hopefully, I will add the pseudo-code today.

sweet, I'm really curious as to what features you selected for your model