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Comment by mpd | Hacker News Reader

It's not really on-topic, but why do people name their projects with names that are very difficult to find via search engine? I really don't understand this mindset.

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I guess they don't understand how search engines work, like that dumb company that created the unsearchable programming language Go.

Which would have been a terrible name if they weren't simultaneously controlling the bully pulpit.

I think this has hugely influenced the number of people who refer to it as 'golang' instead of just 'go'.

If a query comes up with junk I usually replace 'go' with 'golang'.

All projects start that way, mostly because it very hard to invent a new noun for something. Some projects just get really popular and then get high on search rankings for that noun organically.

I get that¸ but naming your project a single word that has tons of pre-existing search results can't be a great idea if you're looking for traction. The average person's (or even programmer's!) Google-fu has always been much worse than I expected, ime.

I don't think this is actually an issue. You can always add context to searches -- rather than searching for just "stevia" you can search for "stevia iOS layout"

I mentioned it in my response to the other reply, but I've found that the average programmer's Google-fu is actually quite poor, and they would not do that subsequent narrowed search.

Doesn't matter anyway, Google nowadays just ignores some words if it feels like it. Even if you add quotes << "stevia" "iOS" "layout" >> then you're not guaranteed that the pages will have all the words in. Google need a "just show me the results I asked for" button.

Sometimes you have to add the boolean nots.

PHP templates -"WordPress" -"joomla" -"codeignitor" -"drupal"

Even worse is the tendency to give every subproject a non-descriptive name. E.g. Safari on iOS/OS X

This just raises the mental burden and lowers discoverability.

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