There are some tools in the domain name researcher's arsenal  that bear closer examination... and one such tool is the powerful - and free - DeletedDomains.com website.

As well as providing statistics on various aspects of domain name registration that make for interesting reading, DeletedDomains.com's main focus is its excellent search engine, which enables you to dig deeply into the morass of recently expiring and deleted domains that are on offer at any one time...

From the DeletedDomains homepage, select the "Power Search" link to access the main search engine. You will be confronted with a search engine input form that may at first sight appear daunting, but which will soon become like second nature to you as you find yourself using it more and more frequently to hunt for valuable domain names.

This search engine works on a database that contains recently deleted domain names, and domain names that have entered "on-hold" status prior to being deleted. While the database itself remains concealed, you can get excellent snapshots of the most relevant names through judicious use of the search options presented on this page.

The screenshot above shows the various search options offered within the Power Search screen.

You can choose to search for domain names with a .com, .net or .org ending, or you can choose to match domain names with any of these endings.

You can limit your search to names that have actually been deleted (i.e. which have become available for reregistering), names that have been placed "on-hold", or a combination of both. You can also specify the elapsed time period on which to search (this enables you, for example, to search for all domain names deleted within the last 24 hours).

You can fine tune your search by specifying a character or sequence of characters that must appear in the domain name, as well as character(s) that should not appear. If you're not interested in domain names with hyphens or numbers in them, you can check the appropriate boxes to discard these from the search results.

Let's construct a specific search to show the real power locked up in this search tool: we're interested in domain names relating to "antiques" that have expired within the last 30 days. But we're not interested in any domain name that begins with an "e" (we're fed up with the "e" naming trend).

So we can configure the search to return just .com domain names that have expired within the last 30 days. In the first "contain" box, we enter "antiques" (meaning that this string should appear in our results). In the second "contain" box, we select "do NOT start with" and enter "e". Finally, for a nice set of clean results, we check the exclude hyphens and exclude numbers boxes.

It's well worth practicing with a few of your own pet interests - you'll most likely be amazed at just how many useful domain names you can unearth using this FREE tool... and while the intent is obviously to encourage you to register domain names that catch your interest through DeletedDomains.com's partner registrar, in practice you can use any registrar you like.

	There is a small bug in the DeletedDomains search engine that you need to understand in order to extract the maximum benefit from the results it returns... The DeletedDomains search engine will frequently show domain names as having "expired" the day before it shows them as having been deleted. When it does so, they have actually already been deleted - so it's well worth checking the availability of a particular domain that catches your eye, even if DeletedDomains has it flagged as "expired" rather than "deleted"

NOTE: The DeletedDomains database seems to get updated  approximately once a day in the early hours of the morning West Coast USA time.