On a related topic, the name of the company I work for starts with a colon. The rest of the name is a common adjective. As you can imagine, it is virtually ungooglable at the moment. Any thoughts on how to get around this?
Just change the name. It'll be easier and more cost effective in the long run.
I've started working with some software called STACK recently, and it's almost impossible to find anything by searching (go ahead and try!). If it was a commercial product they would be sunk.
Those people made it so that one-letter identifier names and junk like ‘fmt’ and ‘Fprintln(w)’ is again okay. So the unusable name fits the spirit quite well.
BASIC programming ironicly may return better results than if you search for something about a more mainstream current language e.g. python. I often find the first few results are some search engine spam... tutorialspoint or geeksforgeeks etc, when a link to the API would be the logical first result. (Usually the first link to the api is for 3.4 or some random version also)
I've often wondered if any metallurgists have tried to run computer simulations of the annealing process. How would you find their research if they had?
Actually yes :) At least the optimization crowd don't use the phase 'heat treatment', which helps somewhat. But who I really feel bad for is the recruiters trying to hire a chemist who specialises in the element lead.
I don't know whether they actually do it but it seems really easy to treat "BASIC" as a distinct idiomatic token from "basic" when the searcher bothers to get the casing right.
It really is amazing how big a difference this makes.
I've started using Apple's Aperture software recently (I'm well aware it's been discontinued). I really like it, but my biggest frustration is that it's difficult to learn how to do new things, because "aperture" is a generic word in photography. I can't search for the name and get results about the software.
One of my favorite mobile games is Antiyoy, by Yiotro (https://github.com/yiotro/Antiyoy) who also created other games like Vodobanka, Achikaps, and Bleentoro.
The creator mentioned that he picked the names because they were pronounceable, unique, memorable, and searchable. That misses out on meaningfulness and familiarity, but those are expensive - by dropping those requirements, you gain easy SEO, trademarks, domains, etc. A big company knowing they're going to sell millions of copies can spend 5 figures on a domain and 6 figures on SEO, but I don't think it's worth it for most startups.
Huh, I play these and I didn't know that's why that had these names, I assumed they were compound words in some language I didn't know. This is like a reverse "XKCD" naming convention.
Limiting the dates to indexes before 2016 might help (at least with google). You can usually train google to get you what you want after a few searches. This was initially a problem with the Elixir programming language, but it learned what I actually wanted it started letting me just type in the term elixir without specifying it was a programming language. On other computers not associated with that account, it does revert back to the not-so-useful results.
> but it learned what I actually wanted it started letting me just type in the term elixir without specifying it was a programming language
Oh, you know what, this might be largely my own fault. I purposefully use Startpage.com as my search engine in order to avoid getting customized results (while still using Google's index).
I worry that customized results put me in a filter bubble—but they certainly have their advantages!
No lies detected, but because they aren't professional software I don't have to search for stuff as often. And the other "Professional" Apple app I use is Final Cut Pro, which doesn't similarly have this problem.
Back when I worked at a comparison shopping engine, I had a bit of a laugh when I saw that the indexing pipeline was generating error messages because the "clean" function returned empty for some products in the feed from Amazon, because they had names like "++++++".
It was usually musical albums that liked to have names that made it impossible for fans to find the music.
However, they benefitted greatly in the early ‘00s. If you had them in your Apple Music library, iTunes always put them at the top of your alphabetical music library, keeping them top of mind, ! comes before A. There might have a similar iTunes Store benefit too.
In 1997 Torsten Pröfrock released a highly sought-after dub techno album on the legendary Chain Reaction label under the name "Various Artists". It's a quintessential record in the Basic Channel genre. You can listen it here: https://youtu.be/3165Sf-q8dY
SiriusXM truncates a "The" prefix from artist names (so "The Cure" and "The Who" become "Cure" and "Who"). I always wondered how it would display The The. Would it be "The The" (special case), "The" (default removal of "The"), or an empty string "" (in the unlikely case the algorithm recursively removed "The" prefixes)? Eventually they played a The The song and the answer is "The The".
There’s a video on YouTube with three full-width explanation points as the title. I watched it once, and although it wasn’t particularly interesting, it bugs me that I cannot find it again.
Convince the powers-that-be in your company to invest in contracting with a marketing/SEO person or team to help come up with a new name. You want someone with marketing chops so that it's a good name, but you also want someone who knows about SEO so you don't end up on the second page for your own name search.
I was curious what googling only a negative query would do and for this, -"Yahoo" returns just the dictionary definition of the word "yahoo" and no search results.
