Journal · Product
Domain search without the sign-up: what we store and why
No account, no email list, no cookies of our own. What happens to the names you type, where your shortlist lives, and how the site pays for itself.
A domain search is a small, private thing. You are testing names you may never use, and some of them may be the name of a company you haven’t announced yet. There is no reason for that to live in an account.
Why searches deserve some care
Domain searching has a history. Around 2008, registrars were accused of “front-running”: you searched for a name on their site, left to think about it, and it was gone when you came back. ICANN looked into it. Whether or not it was widespread, the lesson stuck, and it is why people hesitate before typing a good idea into a stranger’s search box.
domainer.gg is not a registrar. We can’t register what you search, and we don’t link searches to a person.
Where things go
- The text you type is sent to availability checks and, if you describe an idea, to the AI provider that writes the suggestions. That’s the whole trip.
- Saved names are written to your browser’s local storage. They never reach our servers.
- A share link carries the list inside the link itself. There’s nothing on our side to look up.
- Cookies: none of ours. Registrars set their own once you click through.
- Server logs keep an IP address, a time and any errors, for up to 14 days, so we can run the service and stop abuse.
Check it yourself
Open your browser’s developer tools, go to Application, then Local Storage, and look for a key named dg:saved. That is your shortlist, and it is the only thing we keep for you.
We would rather earn a click than collect an email.
The trade-off
No account means no sync. Clear your browser data or switch devices and the list doesn’t follow you. The fix is the share link: copy it once from the Saved page and keep it somewhere you’ll find it, and the list reloads from the link on any device.
How we pay for it
When you register through a registrar link, the registrar pays us a commission. Your price is the same as going there directly. We list the same registrars for every name, whatever they pay us, and every button that opens one says so. That’s the whole business model.