Good free expiring domain name finder

[Fish]

Don't know how long he will keep this up (and free), but this offers filtered lists of Namejet and Godaddy expiring auctions as well as drop lists. Sortable by a variety of parameters, and showing how many other extensions are registered. Very useful - best I've found at the price ($0).
http://www.genericdomainfinder.com/

[genericdomainfinder]

Thanks for the shout out Fish - that's my site. No plans to charge for it any time soon. I earn something through affiliate links, which is enough to keep me interested in it for now.

Let me know any feature requests or bugs you find, so I can continue to make the site better.

[Clinton]

Hi genericdomainfinder, welcome to experienced-people.net.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Have you been in domaining long? What prompted you to start this service?

[genericdomainfinder]

Clinton - thanks for being some welcoming on your forum here. Generic Domain Finder has always been a side project to me. I've run a business related to software development for some years. Over time, I got interested in domain name, and more particularly, how to get good domain names. Often times, when I wanted to start a new project, I'd find the perfect domain name already registered - and then, my second and third choices registered too.

The first version of Generic Domain Finder was a combination of keyword tool and domain availability tool. Basically you could do a keyword search, get a few hundred related results back, and see the availability of all of those results. It's kind of a clever system, and it's an interesting way to find some good domain names. That feature still exists on the site now, and it's the only part of the site that I charge for right now.

After a few months, I found this service, Estibot, which provides an instant domain name appraisal. I thought, how interesting, what a great way to find good domain names. The quick feedback of their appraisal API really helped to quickly decide which domain names were potentially valuable, and which ones were not. I signed up for their API service, and integrated it to Generic Domain Finder. It was great - you could sort the results by the most valuable domain, and it was a useful way to find valuable or interesting domain names.

Well, I told a few people about it, and they blogged about it, and a few days later, Estibot suspended my API account. Basically, they didn't want me to publish their appraisal values publicly for everyone to see.

I don't give up that easily, and I figured I was on to something, since the few people I showed that version to thought it was really useful. So, I started thinking about how to generate a computer based, instant appraisal of a domain name. Within a month or so of hacking around, I created a system that seemed to give a pretty rough estimate of a domains value. Basically, it takes into account factors like the amount of monthly search volume, average cpc for paid search, number of keywords in the domain, number of characters, the TLD, and a few other factors.

Up until that point, I'd actually never even heard about any of these domain name after market sites, like SnapNames and NameJet. It was amazing the day I stumbled across NameJet, and saw the quality of domain names that get auctioned off there every day, that people have just let expire from their accounts.

Once I saw those sites, I put all of my energy towards generating automatic appraisals of those domain names, and creating the filtered lists that you can see on the site today.

It's been really interesting actually. At any given time, there will be a couple hundred thousand names listed on those sites. You'll get sore eyes trying to look through all of those domain names to find anything worth buying. If you use Generic Domain Finder, you bring that list down to about 1000 or 2000 names per day that have any kind of value, using the appraisal system I developed.

I'm not a professional domain investor by any means. If I was, I don't think I'd give away all of the information I do on the site for free. At this point, it's all a really fun and interesting project for me. I buy around 10 to 20 domain names every month. Usually, the names that I buy are those that I think have some 'hidden value', that were overlooked by the big time domain name investors. The majority of the names I buy, are either out of NameJet, or SnapNames, that have no bids, or names that I pick up with a drop catching software that I wrote (that's another story). There are actually a lot of good values available out of the 'dropped domains' listing in the Generic Domain Finder site - from names that have just expired and dropped from the registry, but that have not yet been re-registered yet.

Anyways, that's the story of how the site came to be. I'm still having lots of fun adding new features to the site, and I have lots of great ideas for new features to add, so stay tuned, and I'll add a new release every month or two, with some features.

[Fish]

It's a great site, thanks. I hadn't been buying at auctions, and used to use Dropday. One thing, I'm amazed at the increased competition for domains. I had been hearing about it, but it's an entirely different experience to see names I might have snagged at minimum bid before now going for over $100 - and names I might have gotten for $100 or so now going for over $300. And of course, far more last minute bidders than before.