I realized that I knew how to quantify this frustration. One, how many pronounceable domains exist for a given number of characters? Two, given a finite answer to One, what is the probability that a domain in this space is registered?
I recently made a tool to find pronounceable domains, partially using Markov techniques. I started with a published frequency table of letter trigrams in English and simply brute-forced my way to find every possible overlapping combination of trigrams that would fit in a given length of characters. I assumed that a domain had to start with a valid starting trigram but could end at the length limit with any trigram. This process produces a set of some real but mostly nonsense words that should be pronounceable to English speakers. All results are limited to dot-com domains.
The results:
- For length = 5, there are 265,722 total possible pronounceable domains
- For length = 6, there are 1,702,669 total possible pronounceable domains
- For length = 7, there are 10,843,465 total possible pronounceable domains
Next I randomly sampled from these spaces to figure out the percentage of the possible dot-com domains for each length that are already registered. The results:
- For length = 5, of 481 sampled from 265,722 possible names, 92.52% were registered
- For length = 6, of 941 sampled from 1,702,669 possible names, 45.48% were registered
- For length = 7, of 1906 sampled from 10,843,465 possible names, 12.8% were registered
So 92.5% of pronounceable 5 letter dot-com domains are registered, 45.48% were registered for 6 letter domains, and only 12.8% of seven letter domains were taken. (By the way, I've never been able to find an alphabetical 4 letter domain that is not already registered.) Eyeballing the results it did appear that the registered domains did tend to have a better "ring" to them than those that were not, and seven-letter nonsense words often had no ring to them at all, but automatically assessing domain quality was not attempted in this analysis.
This should be a number on our frustrations, and maybe a year from now I can run the same script and see how the numbers have changed.
The area of unregistered pronounceable 5 letter domains, representing 19,876 names, is barely visible. This is plotted according to the absolute number of domains on a linear scale. The next chart shows the percentage available per length:
To give you an idea of what the output of this process looks like, I reproduced some output for each character length below.
The area of unregistered pronounceable 5 letter domains, representing 19,876 names, is barely visible. This is plotted according to the absolute number of domains on a linear scale. The next chart shows the percentage available per length:
To give you an idea of what the output of this process looks like, I reproduced some output for each character length below.
| len = 5 | len = 6 | len = 7 |
|---|---|---|
ANTON.com registered ANTOP.com registered ANCLE.com registered ANCRA.com registered ANCOM.com registered ANGLA.com registered ANGRO.com registered ANSED.com registered ANSEC.com registered ANNER.com registered ANORT.com registered ANORD.com registered ANORR.com available ANOME.com registered ANONA.com registered ANONO.com registered ANEDI.com registered ANEST.com registered ANEEN.com registered ANECA.com registered ANETI.com registered | ANDENO.com available ANDEMA.com registered ANDITI.com available ANDARN.com available ANTERR.com available ANTESS.com available ANCESI.com available ANCERO.com registered ANCLEM.com available ANGLEG.com registered ANSTON.com registered ANSENI.com available ANICER.com registered ANNICE.com registered ANNOWI.com available ANORNE.com available ANONES.com available ANECON.com registered ANETAC.com registered ANELOC.com available ANELDE.com available | ANDEAST.com available ANTORRI.com available ANTOWEA.com available ANTARRE.com available ANTABIT.com available ANTHARI.com available ANTHIRE.com registered ANTUTHE.com available ANCEDEP.com available ANCHATH.com available ANCHITA.com available ANCHREL.com available ANCLEAK.com available ANCRIME.com available ANCROAT.com available ANGERRO.com available ANGEDIT.com available ANGICIE.com available ANGRANO.com available ANSITUT.com available ANSIMPE.com available |
