is there a way to google for part of a site name?

Factual Questions
1

Maybe the thread title should be "Is there a ‘telephone book’ which lists names of web sites?

Suppose I want a specific site , but can only remember part of its name. How can I find it?

Example: I want to return to a site about computer CAM/CAD systems. But I can’t remember if the name of the site was:
cadsys . com
or cadsystem . com
or cadsystemS . com
or camcadsystem
or camcadsystemS
or maybe it wasn’t even dot com–maybe it ended with dot org, or dot edu or co.uk

I dont want to search web pages with text that mentions cad systems, I just want to search a list of site names. Is this possible?

2

Try “allinurl: cad” in the search field.

From here.

Looks like you can also do the following for searching for sites with that URL and the page includes certain text :

“your search terms inurl:cad”

3

I tried the allinurl option but if the OP is like me, this is not good enough. I’d want the search to provide a list of website URLs, in alphabetical order.

4

How are website names assigned?
(I remember when the internet was young, there was a lot of fuss about people reserving popular names and then selling them for big money.)

Isn’t there a central governing body that approves the names? Who prevents duplicate names? There must be a way to assemble a master list. If so, why isn’t it available for searching?

5

You can try the DomainTools.com Domain Search.

I don’t know where they get their info and whether it’s exhaustive.

6

There’s really no point to having a list of all registered domain names: half would be porn and a quarter would be dummy ad pages. What Google actually does for us is figure out which sites are actually something a person would want to see.

For this particular case, if you can remember any unique words on the page, you should be able to find it again. For the general case, use Chrome as your browser so you can do a full search on your browsing history.

7

The short answer is that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the governing body for domain names, they decide what the Top-Level Domains (TLD) are created (e.g. .com, .net, .biz). ICANN then delegates the responsibility of selling domains on those TLDs to accredited Registrars (e.g. Verisign). Generally there’s only 1 or a small handful of Registrars responsible for each TLD so that there is no confusion and duplicates.

Registrars and their resellers then sell the domain names on a first-come first-served basis with essentially no regulations except where required by law for Country Code TLDs (e.g. .com.au). Hence the rise of squatters as a viable business model and the huge disputes over ICANN’s new proposal for numerous new TLDs.

Domains are purchased (or rather leased) for a duration of at least 1 year, after which time the lease automatically expires and owner has the first exclusive option to renew the domain name (they can opt to auto-renew so that they never release it).

It’s not particularly useful to have a master directory for people to scan through (like a phone book) given the insanely large number of domain names out there and the significant proportions that are porn, spammers, advertising networks, fraudsters, squatters, backoffice technical use only and general garbage.

Further info:

ICANN

Registrars
http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/accredited-list.html

8

Well if you actually went to the page and are using Google Chrome you will have no problem. The search function in the “address bar” will find everything you have used. For example if I type the letter a I get the last 52 sites I have been to with an a in them starting with site names. For most sites I go to often I only have to type one letter and hit enter.