Absolutely! We pride ourselves on not tracking, logging or storing any search related information.

You can rest assured that your searches are, and will remain, 100% private.

name|grep can wrongly report a domain name as available if it doesn't exist on our database, either because:

1. the domain might have been registered in the last 24 hours
2. the domain might be in its redemption period and pending deletion
3. the domain might not have any configured name servers yet

We estimate that the total number of domain names wrongly reported as available by our tool (aka "dark domains") is lower than 0.5% of the total number of domains registered globally. This percentage is so small that you shouldn't have to worry about it – however, since you can use name|grep to quickly search and filter thousands of domain names at once, there's an increased chance that you may encounter a couple of these edge cases occasionally.

Unfortunately, without compromising speed, features or your privacy, there's little we can do to improve this.

Yes it is!

Just do a search like you normally would and then simply copy the URL from your browser.

A regular expression (or regex for short) is a simple, yet very powerful way of matching a search pattern to all the strings you're interested in. If you ever heard of wildcards, then it's something similar, just way more powerful.

In name|grep, you can use a regular expression to quickly search for all the available and unavailable domain names that match the pattern you provided, up to a limit of 50 thousand unique domain names per each individual search.

Here's a simple example foo|ba[rz]|go{1,59}gle to give you a little taste.

We implement a subset of the PCRE dialect. Our system recognizes the following tokens:

[abc]

matches a single character of: "a", "b" or "c"

[^abc]

matches a single character except: "a", "b" or "c"

[a-z]

matches a single character in the range: "a" to "z"

[^a-z]

matches a single character not in the range: "a" to "z"

(foo|bar|baz)

matches one of: "foo", "bar" or "baz"

It's possible to combine them, for instance: foo(|ba[rz]|[0-9a-z]). We also support the following shorthands:

. or \w

equivalent to [0-9a-z-] ("0" to "9", "a" to "z" and "-")

\d

equivalent to [0-9]

\D

equivalent to [^0-9]

Token repetitions are also supported (where x is any of the tokens we learned about before):

x?

repeat x zero or one times

x*

repeat x between zero and infinite times

x+

repeat x between one and infinite times

x{n}

repeat x exactly n times

x{n,}

repeat x between n and infinite times

x{n,m}

repeat x between n and m times

In order to avoid infinite lookups, we limit the number of unbounded repetitions to the minimum plus 3:

x*

becomes x{0,3}

x+

becomes x{1,4}

x{n,}

becomes x{n,n+3}

Note that there's no need to use conventional regular expression delimiters or modifier flags with our search.

And don't worry about making a mistake! Our search will provide you with realtime feedback as you type.

In name|grep, sets are curated lists of related items that can be used to bootstrap the search for your domain name.

We think that they are very useful, specially if you're drawing a blank and need some creative inspiration or if you just want to perform an exhaustive search around a specific niche. Sets can also be used to gather insights into what is popular or not among domain owners. For instance, if you search for (:colors:)(:nature/animals:), it's clear that the color violet is more unpopular than the other 11 colors in our set, at least when combined with an animal name.

Sets are awesome! Use them creatively.

Yes, you can. Internally, we translate sets into a regular expression alternating group, so when you type:

(:alphabet/letters/vowels:)

Our system transparently translates your query into the following regular expression:

(a|e|i|o|u)

You can take advantage of this behaviour to append your own items to our set, by adding more alternatives:

(:alphabet/letters/vowels:|y)

Which in turn is translated into:

(a|e|i|o|u|y)

It's also possible to combine two or more sets together, like so:

(:greek/deities:|:greek/gods:|:greek/titans:)

We tried to come up with a good variety of general-purpose sets for you to use. However, it's hard for us to think of every possible use case or please everyone, so if you think that we forgot something obvious that would be globally relevant and useful shoot us an email at hello@namegrep.com with your suggestion and we'll take a look at it.

If you happen to know of a reliable data source that we can use to get us started, send that too.

IDN lookups are not supported at this time.

If you'd like to see this implemented, let us know.

We update our internal database daily (every 24 hours).

While we have no intention of supporting every TLD known to man, we do want to expand our current list with a few more geotargetable domains in the near future. Unfortunately, not every TLD sponsor makes its zone file available.