Tools for finding domain names [closed]

I've built out a pet project of mine, and am now looking for a good domain name for it. Arbitrarily doing whois lookups on ideas that pop into my head seems inefficient.

What tools do you use when searching for a good domain name?

Some ideas to get the wheels greased :

• given a few letters does prefix/suffix/infix searches for available domains
• suggests other words from a thesaurus
• shows you short available domains

And of course, another requirement is that the tool isn't shady and quickly registers the domain name while it searches for you.

Solution 1:

May not be a complete solution -- but, try Domize.com

Solution 2:

I enjoy playing around with AjaxWhois. It doesn't fit your search criteria at all, and I don't know about the shadiness, but it's damned fun to use!

Solution 3:

In the interest of avoiding auto-parking of your queries, I recommend that you do a simple nslookup of www.name.tld and then go to your respected registrar when you're ready to purchase it and verify that it is free.

Can't help much in the way of tools, though. I usually look them up by hand, and if I'm looking for a prefix or substring, I'll whip up a little shell script to search the name space for me.