Don't you know WHO I am?

22 Jan 2008 4:10 (Edited: 22 Jan 2008 4:10)

Todays lecture: Names and search engines

Internet has changed many things in our daily lives and today I am going to talk about names and naming. Because finding information from internet is quite hard without search engines, people almost always use search engines when they start looking for something. One difficult thing is to tell the search engine what you want to search.

First example comes from HD DVD and Blu-ray. Blu-ray is one single word (or two words combines with hyphen), HD DVD comes from words HD and DVD. So if you enter HD DVD to your favorite search engine, they usually search for any pages that include words HD and DVD. Because HD and DVD can be at anywhere in page, you will get results that include sites that don't have anything to do with HD DVD. People more familiar with the search engines know that "HD DVD" is good way for looking right information.

Choosing a good name is quite hard. People might find name HD DVD more familiar than Blu-ray when they hear it in regular conversation because of the history of the DVD. But when searching HD DVD, I am quite sure they would just insert words HD and DVD to search engine and get some unneeded results. Blu-ray might not yet ring a bell in regular coffee table conversation, but looking it up from your local search engine is much easier. Even if people type it Blue-ray, they would get better results than HD and DVD.

Searching data from huge databases isn't fast or trivial but normal search engine users aren't interested about science. That is why normal surfers don't use regular expressions when they seek data from search engines. Search engines have to adapt to needs of regular user if they want to number one in search business. This has caused some issues to search engines and to users.

Most search engines don't support too short searches or wildcard characters. Wildcards are easy to understand from performance point, because comparing *ing to huge database is going to be a performance issue. Most people don't miss wildcard characters. Short searches are problematic to normal user. With short I mean keyword that is shorter than 4 characters or combination of those keywords. The most famous example of this issues is band "The Who". The Who first formed in 1964. At that time there wasn't internet so Pete Townshend and John Entwistle didn't really think what example Google would think when someone would want to search information about the who lyrics. This issue has been fixed after that, but issues like this are still very common when name is combined from short and common words.

Corporations and parents can name their products almost as they want. So if you ever have to name something please use few seconds and think about the name. If you want to be sure that anyone can find information about that product or name then remember following things:
1. Be original. Come up with something creative or special.

2. Use letters that your target audience can use.
- The artist formerly known as Prince made good point about this issue. Showing that symbol ain't that trivial.

3. No repeat, no short (nor too long) words, no confusion.
- The The ... well I guess you get this one =)
- The eye might sound like a good name, but hit that to your search engine and see what results you get (say hi to Jessica Alba). Another famous ones are name of those villages/cities/places which are very creative but you can be sure that regular everyday guy can't even type them.
- Mine mine mine. There are lots of words that sound like some other word or they are spelled like some other word.
- /. equals slashdot.org and when you tell someone that go to h t t p colon slash slash slash dot dot org, well you get confusion =)

4. Don't start name with plus or minus
- When you enter -something to search engine it excludes those pages that include something term from results. So if you want to name your band -google, think again =)
- + is commonly used to combine search terms and because of area codes and other stuff also use +, your name might end in endless ocean of noise. +44 and Apples possible i+ don't obey this one =)

5. Check before choosing
- Use different search engines and see what kind of result they give you. Make sure there aren't any acronyms that will slaughter your name.

If you want to hide something, then do the opposite.

Tags: blu-ray dvd engine google hd lyrics names naming search the who

User comments

by dRD @ 23 Jan 2008 4:35

The very thing why I like AfterDawn as a website name ;-) Before 1999, it resulted pretty much nothing on search engines. Then again, the dAwn seems to be problematic to some people, search "afterdOwn" and you get decent amount of results meaning our site, but having it misspelt.

But ye, very, very good point. Virtually nobody uses quotes around their searches, so the name -- whether person searching for it writes it correctly or not -- must be somewhat unique. Which is probably the very reason why we have flickr, digg and engadget :-)

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