Following up on my previous post about finding interesting expired domains, I’ve been looking at Domain Research Tool (DRT) for some time now and decided to give it a go and buy it. It is a pricey tool, but offers powerful features and there is a real potential for a quick return of investment. So, what does it do?

It is designed for bulk scanning of huge lists of domains and applying all sorts of useful checks on all domains. For example, you can import the list of all domains that have been dropped today (or even a full zone file!) and check their Google PR, number of backlinks, Alexa traffic, Overture rankings, etc. You can filter the domain list by keywords, domain length, hyphen existence, existence of numbers, etc, but oddly enough you can’t filter a list after a scan without clearing the list. There are several such examples of poor usability throughout the application, which show that it hasn’t yet matured fully.

DRT performs the scans through proxies which means that your IP doesn’t get banned for performing a huge amount of searches. It also supports a “Turbo mode”, which is basically a cache of domain related data resulting in queries made by other DRT users. This cache is stored on the product’s server. The idea is great, but I’m yet to see this turbo in action - running full scans is quite slow and I don’t believe none of the DRT users has never run the same scans as I do.

Apart from searching for domains, DRT can be used for managing your personal domain portfolio and keeping domain watch lists. The weird thing is that these lists are not persisted across sessions, as if I have dozens of domain portfolios or watch lists and need to have them organized in files!?

All in all, the tool is expensive but powerful and useful and can pay itself back relatively quickly. The good thing about it being expensive is that not many people will have it, which puts you ahead of the game. The downside are some usability issues, I hope the author will work on resolving these and making it a joy to use.

Tags: Expired Domains, Domain Tool