Show HN: I built a search engine for all domains on the internet

Show HN: I built a search engine for all domains on the internet(domainexplorer.io)

5 points by iryndin 192 days ago | 9 comments

Hi HN,

I built DomainExplorer.io, a search and analytics tool that lets you explore newly registered and expired domains across all TLDs — updated daily.

The idea came from my frustration how hard it is to search for registered/expired domains. I wanted a simple and easy-to-use tool with web UI where you could submit queries like:

- Find all domains in .com and .net zones that end with "chatgpt".

- Find all expired domains that have "copilot" substring in name (excluding .ai and .io zones) and their name is shorter than 12 symbols

- Find all domains with "amazon" in name and that were created earlier than June 20, 2023

But there was nothing like that around.

So I decided to built this tool myself.

DomainExplorer.io currently indexes 300M+ active domains from 1,500+ zone files, refreshed daily. You can filter by TLD (zone), name length, active or expired, substring or patterns (e.g. “starts with best”, “ends with copilot”, "contains chatgpt"), and download the results as CSV or JSON.

Tech stack: Go, PostgreSQL, React/TypeScript, hosted on baremetal server (cloud is way too expensive for me for such a project), and a custom search index that I designed and built myself because ElasticSearch/Lucene were either too slow or excessively packed with features that I did not need. As a result, I've built pretty lean and performant search engine for domains, you literally get results within 1-2 seconds across all 300M domains search.

I’d love your feedback — especially around use cases I might be missing (security research, trend tracking, brand monitoring, etc.) and any ideas for making search faster or more useful for developers.

Please give it a try!

https://domainexplorer.io

slig 192 days ago |

Suggestion: have a public view of some selected domains, so that we can see what info your service provides without having to sign up. For instance, https://domainexplorer.io/explore/meta

How hard it was to get access to those daily updated zone files?

iryndin 192 days ago | |

Make sense, thanks for sharing! I've thought about that and have this in my plans.

> How hard it was to get access to those daily updated zone files?

Some are easy, some are harder. Few months ago I've built and launched zone file data provider (https://allzonefiles.io) that DomainExplorer uses. Having that, accessing zone files is fairly easy.

slig 192 days ago | | |

Fantastic, that's something that I might be interested for my domain search tool. Nice dogfooding.

phillipseamore 192 days ago |

You should include a page with stats on number of active and expired pr. TLD.

iryndin 192 days ago | |

Good suggestion, thank you! Will work on that!

busymom0 192 days ago |

Asking to sign in without any ability to test something is disappointing.

iryndin 192 days ago | |

Sign-in is free is costs you nothing.

But I'll think on providing access to the domain search engine (limited dataset, may be) to anyone without asking registration. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, really appreciate that!!!

busymom0 192 days ago | | |

I get that and frankly, agree with you. However, from my experience, even a tiny hurdle in front of the user before they can try something out can cost you a significant amount of users unless you are already well established.