Yes, you can search it, but not in the way you’re thinking.
Every IT professional should have a domain name. If you’re a DevOps Engineer (or any fancy name for sysadmins), I would put it even more strongly as you want a domain for your home network so you can access services with your DNS, like https://plex.domain.name.
Some registrars have a really bad reputation for using the domain you search in their websites to increase its price. If they see a lot of people searching for chromeisevil.com, for example, they will increase its price. It seems to happens a lot on GoDaddy and other registrars.
Of course there are several registrars that don’t do this, like porkbun (they’re great). But if you’re not willing to take this risk, there are some ways to check if a domain is already taken without being tracked for marketing purposes.
The most easy and safer way is to use the ICANN lookup website: https://lookup.icann.org. ICANN is a non-profit organization, so they don’t have this incentive to manipulate prices based on your domain searches.
You always can use the terminal as well. Just running nslookup domain.name will tell you if it’s available or not. If the output is “NXDOMAIN”, it means it’s available. If you see any other message like “No answer” or even the IP addresses, it means it’s already taken.
