Domain Name Search -- Part 2: Finding An Alternative

In Part 1 of this series on domain name search, I covered 8 sites to help find if a specific domain name is for sale, along with several other things to try. But if your name is unavailable at any price, or not even remotely within your budget, then what?

This article will look at domain name search when you don’t have only one specific domain name in mind. If you have not already read it, I suggest that you read Domain Name Search - Part 1: Finding A Specific Domain Name. As for the first article, this one is intended mainly for startup owners or other end users looking for a name, but I think there will be value to most domain investors as well.

Types of Domain Name Alternatives

Before we get into the specifics of search, let’s first consider some of the options when your preferred name, say Example.com is not available:

1. See if the term is available in a respected alternative extension, e.g. Example.io or Example.co. See the next section for an expanded look at some extensions you might consider.
2. Add a prefix, or suffix, to the name, such as GetExample.com or ExampleApp.com or MyExample.com.
3. Search for a two-word name. It may or may not include your term ‘Example’ as long as it is a good fit for your business.
4. Try a creative spelling. For example, the well-known service ‘Lyft’ is a takeoff based on ‘lift.’ If going this route, most suggest making only a single change in spelling from the conventional.
5. Brainstorm other terms with a similar meaning to your preferred one, and use the techniques covered in Part 1 of this series to see if one of those is available in .com within your price range.
6. See if there is a new extension that is particularly appropriate to your business or organization exists, and consider a distinctive first word to go with that extension.
7. Select a made-up ‘word’ in .com that is both distinctive and suggestive of your business. The brandable marketplaces have many listings to choose from.

This is by no means a complete guide to naming alternatives. I am mainly going to focus in on (1) and (3) in this look at search alternatives.

Which Alternative Extensions To Consider

The first question to ask is: What alternative extensions should a startup consider? That is a simple question, but various experts would answer differently.

While .com is used for virtually every type of business, site and organization, most of the other extensions have a narrower field of application. The following are generalizations, but may be helpful for those looking at alternative extensions for their startup:

• Many alternatives use AI these days, and .ai is an obvious TLD to consider, if available in your budget. IdentityDigital taking over operation of the TLD is probably a positive for the extension.
• It is probably fair to say that .io has overall been the first alternative choice, particularly, but not only, for tech-oriented startups.
• While one might first think of .org for the nonprofit sector, it is finding strong use particularly for networked startups, such as those in cryptocurrency or fintech, and for certain sectors, like health and education.
• When companies cannot obtain the .com, they often look to the .co. Although a country code extension, it has for a long time been promoted and recognized as a global alternative.
• There is at least a modest resurgence of .net, one of the initial legacy extensions. This makes sense, since so many modern businesses are in some sense, networks of information systems, resources, devices or people. The new extension .network may also find use.
• The .xyz extension has particularly resonated with decentralized and collaborative networks.
• Quite a few startups begin life as mainly an app, and the .app extension therefore finds significant startup use in most surveys.
• If the business offers a personalized experience or service, or a company simply wants to promote that aspect of their overall business, .me might be a good choice.
• If a business is primarily planning to operate in one country, that national country code is always an option to consider.
• While many sales in .cc are short numerics or acronyms, there is some use of words in the extension particularly in sectors such as collaboration, consulting, clubs, cycling, creativity, and open-source commons applications.
• The .gg extension is a strong alternative for gaming-related businesses. There are of course new extensions like .game and .games.
• The betting sector has been strong in recent years, partly due to regulatory changes in some parts of the world. The .casino and .bet extensions are finding some traction.
• If the business is built around a club model, the .club extension makes sense.
• While there are many new extensions that could be considered, with the emphasis on cloud services, extensions like .cloud, .network, .tech, and .technology come to mind.
• Much of modern business is about people connecting, and extensions like .link cater to that.
• With AI-agents and big data sources, to some degree startups are catering to providing information to a greater degree than previously. Will the .info extension find resurgence?
• The success of .xyz is probably partly related to the fact it does not cater to a specific application area. There are a few other new extensions that are similarly broad, such as .one or .online, although they have not found the same aftermarket success.
• In creating this list, I browsed the NameBio top 100 sales from 2024 and from 2023. In addition to extensions already mentioned above, and some national country codes, such as .fi and .eu, the last couple of years have seen top 100 sales in .club, .world and .win as well.

While the division is somewhat arbitrary, I listed in bold above the alternative extensions that I think are of broadest potential interest. If you are a startup in a particular niche or sector, a good indicator is to see what domain extensions and types are in use by your competitors.

Articles on NamePros on a specific extension illuminate how a specific extension is used. For example,

• Who Is Buying .ORG? showed that in certain sectors there are a significant number of for-profit companies using the extension.
• Types of Names That Sell in .IO provides guidance on that extension, although use has broadened since the article was written four years ago.

Searching for Alternative Extensions

Let’s now zero in on how some of the 8 search sites mentioned in part one can help you find whether your preferred term is available for sale in a preferred alternative extension.

To make the search specific specific, I decided to see how each worked for finding the term ‘assistive’ in an alternative extension. With assistive technology, expansion of assistive services of various types, etc. the term has startup relevance, but probably not so highly in-demand that few exact terms in the name will be listed for sale. It is a term I find the term interesting, and as disclosure a few of the results found were my names.

My preferred site for finding alternative extensions for sale in the Afternic/GoDaddy system was GoDaddy Auctions with Advanced Search. Here are the simple steps:

1. Go to GoDaddy Auctions. No membership is needed to search.
2. Click on the link Advanced Search, just under the search box.
3. Select Keywords. Since I want to see names that exactly contain ‘assistive’, I tick the Exact Match and then enter the term in the Contains line.
4. The user interface is a bit unobvious at this step, but press Return and then click the black Apply Filters.

This process produced the list shown below. It seemed to me that GoDaddy Auctions did a great job of ordering the results, with .com, .net and the popular .co.uk / .uk mear top, but also including well-known alternatives like .co, .me, .app, .info etc., and a bit further down other extensions like .cc. Also, despite many hundreds of new extensions, for this term at least, it picked a couple that work particularly well with this term, like assistive.care and assistive.community.

Use the Advanced link to set up Filters at GoDaddy auctions. In this case set for Exact Match on the term ‘assistive’.​

Results obtained (part of list shown) for exact term ‘assistive’ using GoDaddy auctions site that includes all Afternic listings.​

If the user wanted, they can also use filters like type of sale, price range, age of the domain name, extensions and traffic. Top marks for ease of use and results generated.

At GTDN it seems to me not as easy as going right to GoDaddy Auctions for this type of search. First off, the searcher need to sign up for an account. Then when I do search I can choose Exact. But if I press Search I see nothing, because I forgot to first choose the extensions. Six obvious extensions are in an easy checklist, but then I need to choose others from massive list, and for the person who might not know what to choose, the process is not straightforward. True, GTDN is potentially much more customizable, though, and as I cover later, there are powerful filters and sorting options that domainers will like at GTDN. For another type of search covered below, GTDN is my preferred option.

I went to Sedo to try to do the same search for the term ‘assistive’. To its credit, when I simply searched on ‘assistive’ in basic search at Sedo, it did produce a strong list. But when I tried to use Advanced Search, with all of the filters, under Keyword Placement it gave me only the choices Contains, Starts with and Ends with, no Exact box. I thought oh I will work around it by setting number of characters to 8, but it did not work! It let me set the slider up to 7, with 0 results naturally, then it jumped to infinity. Sedo Advanced Search is excellent overall, but for this specific search it came up lacking.

I tried Sudos Market Search, and it was easy — just enter term ‘assistive’ and gives a list at both Sedo and Afternic. There is no Exact check mark, or Advanced Search filtering system, so the Sedo list at Sudos Search has a number of longer words.

Nevertheless, you can see that while many of the names are the same on both lists, that .ai that was no on the GoDaddy Auctions search is listed Make Offer at Sedo, for example. It was clearly the best and easiest of the three search options that cover both Afternic and Sedo. Note that only Sedo MLS results are included, however.

Sudos Search is easy to do – no account needed, and it shows both Sedo and Afternic listings. This is part of search results for term ‘assistive’. While there is not the customization possible with some of the other search sites, it does a good job of showing the most relevant listings. Only Sedo names that have MLS enabled will appear, I believe based on my testing.​

Searching for Two-Word .COM

Let’s now look at searching for a two-word .com using the various sites. The concept of AI-powered agents is trending these days, so I decided to search for a two-word .com domain name with ‘agent’ as the last word.

I had thought that NameFit would be ideal for this, since there is a filter to choose the number of words (2), extension (.com), etc. However, when I selected the button for com, it only showed me xyz results! Playing around, I discovered that you need to choose the button beside the one you want, so if you choose net, com results will show - confusing, right? Even after I figured that out, there were not enough options to choose the word placement I wanted. Also NameFit’s idea of what is a two-word name is not the same as mine. So at this time, I don’t recommend NameFit for this particular type of search. As mentioned last week, it does perform well for search on specific names, however.

I next tried GTDN using the Help! I want options button, and overall it is probably the best tool right now to search for two-word domain names listed at Afternic. I do think the user interface needs improvement. I am told that a new version will be active soon.

For this testing, I entered the keyword ‘agent’ in the box for Ends With, the extension was set to .com only, and I set the number of words maximum to 2. I did not set price range, but you can. GTDN found 4040 results at Afternic.

The real power of GTDN is that you can, with a pull-down menu on the right, select how results are ordered, for example from high to low price, or reverse, by age of domain name, or number of registered TLDs. For example, when I selected TLD Count (High to Low) I got the top two results shown below. I think most would agree both are amazing names. They also are at top if I order by age, since one is 28 years aged and the other 22 years.

When searching Afternic listings for multi-word combinations, GTDN is very powerful. You can set things like number of words or characters or price range, and can filter results based on different parameters. Here I show the top of search results for .com extension, two-word names, with the second word ‘agent’, and with the list ordered according to number of TLDs registered for the term.​

I tried a similar search on GoDaddy Auctions using Advanced Search to look at Afternic listings. While it is easy to find two-word .com names ending in the term ‘agent’, with only characters, and not words, filters, I found it less easy to find exactly names of interest to me. With a less popular word, however, one could manually search the list.

Advanced search at Sedo is capable in searching for names based on term placement, TLD, number of words or characters, price range, etc. I could readily search for .com names that end with the term ‘agent’ with a maximum of two words. Sedo search will show you some results not on Afternic – in particular, Atom Premium inventory is ported to Sedo, while only some are listed on Afternic by the seller. A nice feature of Sedo is that you can Save this Search. Sedo search worked well in this trial, and produced more than 2000 possibilities for two-word .com names with the second word ‘agent’

This shows the filter I used at Sedo to search for two-word for .com names ending in ‘agent’. Note in the display the descending arrow by Price - results can be sorted by several possible parameters.​

Summary

If you are searching the Afternic/GoDaddy inventory for a specific exact term in popular alternative extensions, I suggest going directly to GoDaddy Auctions.

Remember that will not find names listed only on Sedo, so use Sedo search as well, or search at a registrar that shows Sedo inventory, and gives as suggestions the more popular extensions.

It is easy to do, and a Sudos Market Search will easily show you most, but not all, of the names you would probably consider, with Afternic and Sedo listings attractively presented side by side with pricing shown. For those outside the domain business, this may be the most user friendly search.

If you are searching for multi-word alternatives in .com, there is a bit of a learning curve, but the best tool right now seems to be GTDN. The control it gives you over the search, and in how results are ordered, is impressive.

Right now at least, GTDN only covers Afternic, so also do a Sedo Advanced Search on two-word .com names for your criteria.

I am glad that we have NameFit and DomDB in the search space. Both are early development and will undoubtedly improve, but in my limited testing the other tools seemed stronger for these specific two types of search.

These comments only apply to the two types of search I concentrated on in this article, and are based on limited testing of each site.

Since this article is considered mainly for end users, I did not include the Afternic Advanced Search tool included with Domain Academy.

I encourage readers to add their own comments related to searching for alternative extensions in a term, and for two-word .com with one of the words specified.