I built a search engine for all domains on the internet
Details
- External ID
- 45843973
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built a search engine for all domains on the internet
- Website domain
- domainexplorer.io
- Launched
- Nov. 7, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.0982532751091703
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hi HN,I built DomainExplorer.io, a search and analytics tool that lets you explore newly registered and expired domains across all TLDs — updated daily.The idea came from my frustration how hard it is to search for registered/expired domains. I wanted a simple and easy-to-use tool with web UI where you could submit queries like:- Find all domains in .com and .net zones that end with "chatgpt".- Find all expired domains that have "copilot" substring in name (excluding .ai and .io zones) and their name is shorter than 12 symbols- Find all domains with "amazon" in name and that were created earlier than June 20, 2023But there was nothing like that around.So I decided to built this tool myself.DomainExplorer.io currently indexes 300M+ active domains from 1,500+ zone files, refreshed daily. You can filter by TLD (zone), name length, active or expired, substring or patterns (e.g. “starts with best”, “ends with copilot”, "contains chatgpt"), and download the results as CSV or JSON.Tech stack: Go, PostgreSQL, React/TypeScript, hosted on baremetal server (cloud is way too expensive for me for such a project), and a custom search index that I designed and built myself because ElasticSearch/Lucene were either too slow or excessively packed with features that I did not need. As a result, I've built pretty lean and performant search engine for domains, you literally get results within 1-2 seconds across all 300M domains search.I’d love your feedback — especially around use cases I might be missing (security research, trend tracking, brand monitoring, etc.) and any ideas for making search faster or more useful for developers.Please give it a try!https://domainexplorer.io
Enrichment
- Theme
- developer infrastructure and monitoring utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- search engine for internet domains
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While the search UI and subscription logic are trivial, aggregating and indexing the daily DNS zone files and registration feeds for 1,100+ TLDs requires significant data pipeline infrastructure.
What it would actually take: A functioning system requires ingest pipelines downloading Centralized Zone Data Service (CZDS) zone files daily across hundreds of gTLDs and ccTLDs, parsing tens of millions of domain records. The backend demands a high-performance search index (like Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, or Meilisearch) capable of efficient substring queries across hundreds of millions of domain names alongside automated WHOIS/RDAP crawlers.
Discussion
9 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: allzonefiles.io (zone file data provider)
Concerns raised: Requires sign-in before users can try the tool, Registration hurdle costs significant user acquisition, No public demo or preview available
Feature requests: Public preview of sample domains without sign-up, Limited free access to domain search engine, Stats page showing active and expired domains per TLD
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 93 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #92 of 94 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Looks like the first mover among its competitors.
- Osint tool that finds exposed files on domains · hn · 2026-07-05 · 58 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Domain Expiry Saver · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- DropPerch · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Open database tracking 77K public DNS servers every 10 minutes · hn · 2025-12-18 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- D.NIX. · ph · 2026-09-20 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Notify.domains · ph · 2026-09-06 · 249 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- DNS Benchmark Tool · hn · 2025-11-19 · 59 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- heade.rs · ph · 2026-09-29 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.