As a domain name investor, I’m always excited to see new products and services to help me find the best domain names. Most of my time is spent buying existing domains and expired domains. Recently, I came across a new service that helps you find unregistered domains. You can register domains for under $10–far less than the cost of expiring domains–so finding good unregistered domains can be profitable.
Granted, there aren’t a lot of great domains that aren’t registered yet. So I approached Unmined.com with an open mind, and decided to judge it based on its usability and execution rather than the unregistered domains it provided.
Unmined.com lists 100,000s of domains that are available for registration. It categorizes them (e.g. auto-related, 3-character, dictionary words) and puts them into lists. You can review each list and add your favorite domains to a sort of “my domains” list. The service costs $4.95 for one day, $14.95 for a month, or $89.95 for a year.
As I suspected, I didn’t find many great domains using the service. I found some decent ones, and registered a couple. For example, I registered ePresbyterian.com.
Unmined.com is innovative by categorizing domain names. I’m not familiar with other services for discovering domains based on categories. It also helps you find domains when you don’t have particular requirements (e.g. specific keywords).
But Unmined.com also has its shortcomings. Here’s what Unmined.com needs to work on to become a more valuable site:
-Add search functionality. Free services like NameBoy.com offer search. If you’re looking for a particular keyword, it’s a pain to scroll through dozens of pages to look at laundry lists of unrelated domains.
-Use a new dictionary. Unmined.com lists a lot of domains in its dictionary that aren’t single dictionary words by any stretch of the imagination, and many of them have abbreviations (e.g. askmencom.com, Hewlett-Pack.com). This is especially annoying when the same words show up in the eDictionary lists.
-Create new dictionary, eDictionary, and iDictionary sections that only include singular and plural nouns and verbs. That way you won’t have to sift through domains like eRegularly.com and eIncluding.com.
-Create a hyphen filter. Most domains with hyphens are worthless, so it would be nice to review lists that exclude hyphenated domains.
-Add “Go To” functionality. When you get to the 10th or 15th page of a list, and then want to come back to the list later, you have to click “next” a dozen times to get to where you left off. It would be nice to be able to “go to page 15”.
Is Unmined.com worth it? Hats off to Unmined.com for creating a new service for the domain name industry. At $4.95 for a one-day trial, it won’t break the bank to check it out. But you might be just as well off using NameBoy.com for free until Unmined.com adds to features.
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