Looky — A UK Domain Tool

[ben]

I have just finished the MVP of Spacebound, a simple UK based domain tool for valuations, drop calculations and general lookups. Looking to get some feedback on it. This is the initial launch, been working on this for about 4 days and have put to use a domain which I registered a few weeks ago which I quite liked.

Features:

• Integrates with RDAP to show registration date and expiry date, as well as registering tag, and current tag. This info may be expanded further down the line.
• Performs a calculation to return you the drop date, the messaging of which is dependant on the domain names current window of status, ie. pendingDelete, 90 day expiry window and prior to that etc.
• Performs a custom based valuation based on 3 factors, and integrates with an external API to provide auction and marketplace guide prices based on tens of thousands of domain sales.
• Allows you to integrate with tools like Alfred for macOS for direct lookups via URL ie. spacebound.uk/domain.uk.
• A list of 50 recent lookups for informational and interest purposes, including location based flagging.
• Domain offer list with pop-up for submitting offers, domains which are provided with a custom valuation for auction and marketplace guide prices to give buyers and example of it's worth if sold on the general market. Space here will be available to purchase in near future. Integrated with Turnstile by Cloudflare to prevent bot submissions, and offers will be sent via Mailgun to space owners. Currently they are sent to me, and they are some of my domains, just for display purposes.

Would love people to try it out and see if it's any good for day to day stuff, I made this based on a whim to replace my current workflow which was an Alfred based lookup to rdap.uk, but I wanted a more clear picture of the most important stuff.

Thanks!

EDIT: Forgot to add the link ha. You can visit Looky here.

I saw looky.uk come up in the droplist today, and thought it a perfect opportunity. So the tool has been renamed, on a new domain looky.uk. Functionality updated:

• Unregistered domains now give a clearer message and are handled gracefully.
• Domain analysis is now performed for unregistered domains, giving you a clearer picture of FTR registrations.
• Flag system expanded to include pretty much every location on the planet.
• Recent lookups now display whether the domain was registered or unregistered at the time of lookup.
• Some housekeeping on older domains, which JSON object returned from RDAP was different to modern domains. ie. older than 1996.
• Lookup sanitisation has been improved to avoid any Donald Trump XSS attacks.
• New look, new logo, new domain.

Still to come:

• Expanded domain lookups to 500 most recent entries, better pagination and lazy loading.
• SEO metrics implementation (at least DA or DR to begin with).
• HotJar feedback integration, cookie consent ()

Thanks to @alan and others that are testing and giving feedback, it has really helped.

 

[ben]

Just as an aside for anyone searching for domain valuations on SEO domains, it isn't plugged into any SEO api as of yet, because I'm unsure at present how to go about providing an accurate valuation based on the current technique + SEO metrics. I would perhaps have to have a database of SEO domain sales to gather data from, and maybe even write a custom algorithm to do the math, which is beyond the scope of my ability at present. This doesn't mean it's ruled out of future iterations, and I may even provide an end service for bespoke valuations that need more of a human touch. You ay argue that just getting the DA/DR of the domain is enough to increase its value, but you can have high DR/DA and have a worthless backlink profile, which may even decrease the valuation of a domain prior to taking into account SEO metrics.

 

[paullas]

Very interesting, i have on my to do list to build something like this to work out drop dates but yours is good. I did a few searches ;)

 

[ben]

Very interesting, i have on my to do list to build something like this to work out drop dates but yours is good. I did a few searches ;)

Thanks mate. If you can find any bugs or anything, let me know!

pornhub.co.uk

 

[paullas]

Will do

 

[ben]

Woke up to some nice little XSS attack lol. Thanks to the person redirecting the whole domain to Donald Trumps website sanitisation should work now

 

[ben]

I saw looky.uk come up in the droplist today, and thought it a perfect opportunity. So the tool has been renamed, on a new domain looky.uk. Functionality updated:

• Unregistered domains now give a clearer message and are handled gracefully.
• Domain analysis is now performed for unregistered domains, giving you a clearer picture of FTR registrations.
• Flag system expanded to include pretty much every location on the planet.
• Recent lookups now display whether the domain was registered or unregistered at the time of lookup.
• Some housekeeping on older domains, which JSON object returned from RDAP was different to modern domains. ie. older than 1996.
• Lookup sanitisation has been improved to avoid any Donald Trump XSS attacks.
• New look, new logo, new domain.

Still to come:

• Expanded domain lookups to 500 most recent entries, better pagination and lazy loading.
• SEO metrics implementation (at least DA or DR to begin with).
• HotJar feedback integration, cookie consent ()

 

[username]

Woke up to some nice little XSS attack lol. Thanks to the person redirecting the whole domain to Donald Trumps website sanitisation should work now

At least it redirected somewhere useful

 

[ben]

Now at version 2.2.3, I've been working non-stop on this to implement new features:

• Caching improvements for performance
• Pagination improvements, now includes up to 500 recent entries
• Latest searched domain always at the top
• Includes latest 3 searches, country of origin, date/time
• Registered/unregistered
• Duplicate recent lookups removed and replaced by an array which updates each time it is searched for.
• Lookup count next to each recent lookup to show how many times it has been searched
• Easter egg
• Misc. improvements to code.

Still a lot to do. Working on adding SEO metric, which is broken at the moment as the service I'm using doesn't know why my API token is being rejected. I'm working on it as well as other misc shit like dark mode persistence.

 

[Marek]

I think automated valuations of seo domains would be about as useful as ukba's new feature of an AI overview of the link profile of domains being sold.

Looks great to noobs, zero value to any experienced person with the actual ability to pull a bank card out their pocket and start bidding.

www.looky.co.uk is down are you still moving it?

 

[ben]

I think automated valuations of seo domains would be about as useful as ukba's new feature of an AI overview of the link profile of domains being sold.

Looks great to noobs, zero value to any experienced person with the actual ability to pull a bank card out their pocket and start bidding.

www.looky.co.uk is down are you still moving it?

You’re very negative, Marek. But on the premise of your remark, I don’t necessarily disagree. The valuation side of it is very much alpha in its programming. I’m planning on developing a custom algorithm which will integrate with lots of metrics, drawing from my own experience, in what makes a domain valuable — including SEO.

I’m also hoping somewhere down the line @seemly creates an API I can connect to to extract datasets

Also, if you know anything about me it’s that I couldn’t care less about the .co.uk lol

 

[Marek]

Im not negative, I'm realistic & talking from a position of experience. No serious buyer is going to use Robs gibberish AI stuff, no serious buyer is going to care what your automated script thinks a domain is worth. Nobody asked for a 2024 version of Estibot. I've no idea if other features of what you're trying here would be of use, but forget this whole automated pricing rubbish. But if you dont believe me, other regular big buyers are around. @Hook , any interest in some automated, 3rd party valuation tools or would you rather trust however you're doing it now?

 

[ben]

Im not negative, I'm realistic & talking from a position of experience. No serious buyer is going to use Robs gibberish AI stuff, no serious buyer is going to care what your automated script thinks a domain is worth. Nobody asked for a 2024 version of Estibot. I've no idea if other features of what you're trying here would be of use, but forget this whole automated pricing rubbish. But if you dont believe me, other regular big buyers are around. @Hook , any interest in some automated, 3rd party valuation tools or would you rather trust however you're doing it now?

Imagine if everyone on Earth listened to the people who told them similar things.

Steve Jobs? Einstein? Walt Disney? Elon Musk?

First and foremost, it was developed for my own purposes, but if anyone can make use of it that’s a bonus.

 

[ukbackorder]

Im not negative, I'm realistic & talking from a position of experience. No serious buyer is going to use Robs gibberish AI stuff, no serious buyer is going to care what your automated script thinks a domain is worth. Nobody asked for a 2024 version of Estibot. I've no idea if other features of what you're trying here would be of use, but forget this whole automated pricing rubbish. But if you dont believe me, other regular big buyers are around. @Hook , any interest in some automated, 3rd party valuation tools or would you rather trust however you're doing it now?

You're right any 'serious' buyer wouldn't - they know what they want. But not everybody has access to backlink analysis and the idea is it gives a quick overview, from the link profile, of any good referrers or even if a domain is worth looking into further. People can of course ignore it, as they can ignore any stats they want at ukdroplists, moz, majestic, ahrefs or whatever.

 

[seemly]

First and foremost, it was developed for my own purposes, but if anyone can make use of it that’s a bonus.

This was the exact reason I built domainsaleshistory.uk - to scratch my own itch. Nobody asked for it.

I shared it with the community just in case there was any interest from even a couple of people. I don't need to scratch that itch anymore, but keep it live as an active portfolio piece more than anything else, and people do still use it.

Some people have openly mocked it. Some people need to make themselves feel superior to others. Let them.

Nice work, @ben.

 

[Marek]

You're right any 'serious' buyer wouldn't - they know what they want. But not everybody has access to backlink analysis and the idea is it gives a quick overview, from the link profile, of any good referrers or even if a domain is worth looking into further. People can of course ignore it, as they can ignore any stats they want at ukdroplists, moz, majestic, ahrefs or whatever.

I can't imagine any of these guys we're bidding against on your site don't have access to seo tools. Its £80 per month for a Pro Majestic account like we use, you can go cheaper and get the job done for £40 - less than the min bid on DL/UKBA on a single domain.

It doesn't bother me that it's there I just genuinely can't see how anyone can possibly get any value out of it. The text bit just fills it out with unnecessary bloat - I can put the domain in Maj in 3 seconds and see all the top referring domains and whether they're deleted, nofollow etc.

I do like that you pull in the raw numbers for domains though - they can tell me when I can discount one immediately and not bother spending 5 mins on Maj checking it out. But for ones that are a maybe bid they definitely need a human check in Majestic.

 

[username]

Looking great on the .UK. The .co.uk can do one!

 

[ben]

• Domain truncation added because long fake searches were breaking the layout on mobile. Slightly longer on desktop
• Dark mode finally persisting across session

 

[John]

I think for for it to be more useful as a look up tool, it needs an option on the site to also be able to do bulk look ups like.

UKWhois.co.uk | UK Bulk Whois Checker for UK domains uk bulk whois domain checker

The uk bulk whois checker for UK domains only. Lookup bulk uk whois details for up to 50 domain names at once.

ukwhois.co.uk

If possible somehow given the restrictions and be useful to show what tag the domain is under.

 

[Hook]

I actually quite like the feature on both DomainLore and @ukbackorder that lists the top referral domains, can make a pretty quick judgement if it is worth digging into the backlink profile.

I don't read the AI overview admittedly, but I'm sure it servers a purpose for some, and if it doesn't - it'll be removed, I'm sure. You never know what works until you try.

If you are going to implement SEO metrics: Majestic is the cheapest with bulk checking, or you can use Ahrefs with openapp (urlprofiler, and a few others). Or even dataforseo.com.

GL with the project!