What About Names?
The US Census Bureau has some handy common name files available on their site, so I thought I’d see how one’s luck would be trying to register their own name(s).
If you’re looking for a masculine domain name, you’ll be disheartened to learn that of the 1219 male names listed by the US Census Bureau, every single one is registered. If you’re looking for something feminine, you’re in luck: As I type this, of the 2841 female names listed by the Census, you can soon grab the lucrative recently expired Erlinda.com, or the sitting in purgatory Shanita.com, though both are technically currently taken.
On the family name front, 100% of the top 10,000 family names are registered.
Cross joining the top 300 male names with the top 300 family names finds that ~10,112 of the 90,000 possibilities aren’t registered, to the benefit of anyone named Antonio Hughes and Lawrence Torres out there! Similarly, cross joining the top 300 female names with the top 300 family names finds that ~14,103 possibilities are unclaimed.
Domain Name Love
On the love front, 1958 (68.9%) of the 2841 possible ‘ILOVE’-prefixed female names (using the census set of names) sit unclaimed, which is surprizing, as only 665 (54.5%) of 1219 ‘ILOVE’-prefixed male names remain available.
Continuing down that path, the seedier side of the internet is hardly a secret, and it’s evident in the DNS database as well. 268,971 domains contain the sequence SEX (11,333 of them also containing the sequence FREE), while 143,683 domains contain the sequence LOVE.
Other Tidbits
The most common letter to start a domain is S, with relatively few domains starting with Q, X, Y or Z.
While the most common digit to start a domain is, unsurprizingly, 1.
Every successful company has remoras and haters, so it was interesting to look at the number of suffixed alternatives for some well-known domains. While some of these are actually owned by the root domain owner, most are hanger-ons and critics.
Samples include GOOGLE-AMERICA, GOOGLE-BUDDY, MICROSOFT-EBOOKS, SLASHDOTREVIEW, SLASHDOTSLASH, and YAHOO2007.
Conclusion
Hopefully this was a bit entertaining, and maybe even informative. I’m doing a much more intriguing, large-scale analysis (again, it’s a nice opportunity to demonstrate some of the new SQL Server 2005 functionality) that I’ll publish soon, but these were the low-hanging fruit.
