How to get a list of domains that contain a particular keyword?

Question

I want a list of registered domains which contain a specific keyword.

For example, if "food" is the keyword, I want a list like the following:

foodpanda.com
orderfood.com
www.foodnetwork.com
...

Answer 1

The only way to get the list of domains in full (and for free) is to apply to the appropriate registries for access to their zone files.

Zone files are lists of all registered domains overseen by that registry. Access is free and the lists are usually updated daily. You just need to fill in a form and sign an agreement.

Once you've downloaded a zone file, you can simply search for all domains which contain particular a keyword using your favourite method (e.g. grep).

For .com and .net domains, the registry is Verisign. Here are a few other links to zone files:

• .org
• .info
• .us
• .biz
• .asia

A much larger set of links can be found here.

Note that lists of country-specific TLDs such as .uk or .cn are not usually publicly available.

It is a condition of accessing most zone files (certainly those made available by Verisign) that a person does not make significant parts of the lists publicly available or publicly searchable. For this reason, you are unlikely to find a complete list of domains on free-to-access websites or APIs.

If you're interested, I did a search of a recently downloaded zone file and found that there are 278407 '.com' domains containing the string "food".