How can I brainstorm and check a whole lot of names at once?
I recommend that you make use of the online thesaurus at http://www.thesaurus.com/ and then you cut and paste the words that sound interesting into a text file. You can use one of the Useful Software tools to search the whole text file and see instantly which names have already been registered, and which are available.

I have a long list of domain names to check. Is there any way of checking them easily?
There are a number of ways to check a large list of domain names. If you have your domain names listed in a text file, one per line, you can either use one of the tools on the Useful software page to run a comprehensive lookup test, or use the multi-name lookup forms at DomainDiscover.com or SnapNames.com.

How can I find all the domains with a given word in them?
Tricky. There are tools that will let you find domain names that contain a specific word, but these tools are limited to the first 2000 domain names returned by a given search. While that may not sound like much of a limitation for less common words, if you're looking for domain names with "free" or "auto" or other widely used words in them, 2000 entries won't get you very far. However, it's the best you can do right now - you can always fine tune your search by looking for all "autoa" and then all "autob" domains, and so on. A good tool for such searches is offered by Whois.net in the form of the search box on the front page of the site.

How can I check information associated with my domain name, such as my contact details?
You can use a tool called whois to access the central Registry database; this database contains details of every domain name. There are many places around the Web where you can enter a query to search the database. For example, you can use the search form on this site. Some other lookup resources are listed in the Research tools section.

How can I find out who a given domain name is registered to?
Simple. Use "whois" to look up the name (see the answer to the previous question, above). If the domain name is registered, you will see the name and address of the person or company to whom the name is registered. Your best bet if you want to contact the owner of a name is to contact the person listed in the Administrative Contact section of the information returned by whois.

How can I find out all the names a given company or person owns?
There is unfortunately no way to extract this information from the Whois database at the present time. This search limitation is by design, to stop companies abusing the database by extracting names and addresses for marketing purposes. It's also possible to buy a copy of the whole Whois database, but this will set you back around $10,000.  

How can I find out if a domain name has been taken?
Simply use the form situated on this page. Fill in the complete name you want to check, including the extension such as ".com", ".net" and so on. The form will either return the name of the company or individual owning the domain name, or an indication that the domain name has not yet been taken.

Back to the Domain Name FAQ