How Ninite.com (YC W08) was named by a program -- code included
blog.ninite.com
blog.ninite.com
One thing I learned was that most short words are negative or at least excessively blunt. Webpig, Webzit, Webfat, Webdog, etc. But one name the program generated was Webvia. That wasn't so great but if you switched the words it became a reference to the fact that our software worked over the web.
I'm not sure why you would get a computer involved though. Why not just take a few minutes and think up words with your team, and then play with them until you have something you like? You can't possibly evaluate unlimited possibilities, so why not scope the games to words, phrases, and ideas that connect in your brain?
There's an interesting reason for that.
Although English contains elements from numerous languages, it's two primary ancestors are French and the Germanic Anglo-Saxon.
In the middle ages, most of the English peasantry spoke Anglo-Saxon. The nobility, however, all spoke French for several hundred years after William the Conquerer invaded in 1066.
To this day, that ancient split in languages is still obvious. Everyday words in English, including words for animals, household words and swear words, tend to be Germanic: short, guttural and abrupt.
Words to do with civic society, culture and the ruling class are usually from French. They are usually longer and sound more refined. Examples: parliament, judiciary, government, etc.
English is what happens when Norman soldiers pick up Saxon girls.
Earthy words are short in French too. "Merde" is as abrupt as "shit." And German is full of long words.
What's really going on is that earthy words tend to be short, whatever their origins. And since English is not so much a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and French as a core of Anglo-Saxon with a veneer of French on top, the earthier, more basic words in English tend to have Anglo-Saxon origins.
It will be the chalkboard screetching against your ear for the rest of the life of your company, when new hires, new customers, or colleagues continually pronounce the name "wrong."
Really cool idea, though - impressed with the approach.
OBTW: On your name, in the US does ninite mean "night, night!" or "goodnight" as it does in the UK?
A while ago, I was testing just this assumption in the context of writing a plug-in for a writing program (think Scrivener, not TextMate). I spent a few weeks marking words, names and gibberish as "sounds like a character name", "sounds like a coherent proper/common noun that wouldn't do as a character name", or "is gibberish." I then fed this training data (about 100,000 data points) into a bayesian classifier. The results were okay—it would agree with me to about 80% accuracy—but I gave up on it because I didn't know enough about ML to improve the error, and brute-force scoring another 900,000 words myself just to get a possible 5% improvement seemed a bit bleak.
If anyone is interested in the data set, I could dig it out of storage; it's probably heavily biased toward my preferences in what constitutes a "good" name, though (my backup plan, if it turned out to be a completely subjective evaluation, was to get people to do about a hundred ratings through a website, and then cluster their "creative aesthetics" against others' to help them find people to work with.)
I wonder if the ratio of browser usage for those keywords are the same as the browser usage of site visits. I say this because in Chrome, when there's no link for ninite.com and I select it, it offers me the option to go directly to that link. Every other browser* just lets you copy or search and when I was a Firefox user I searched so I could get a clickable link from Google.
So my point is: is it possible that a large percentage of the searches for "ninite.com" and "www.ninite.com" have that reasoning behind?
* Didn't test in Opera but tested it in IE8, Firefox and Safari.
Hackers (in particular) get hung up on minimizing characters, which is not at all the most important business function of your domain name. Never have I gone to type a long domain name, only to give up halfway through to instead visit a shorter-named alternative, a la Porky Pig.
Domain naming should instead seek to increase memorability, enable verbal communication of the name, strike a proper emotional tone, and avoid spelling ambiguities. If that happens to result in a ten-letter domain name, you know what? It's okay. Nobody cares how short your name is if they've forgotten it.
It occurs to me that to increase memorability, we should take a cue from mnemonics. People tend to be squeamish about mnemonic devices. Have you heard of these memory competitions where people memorize the order of a deck of cards? You would think that the people with superhuman memories have no need for "silly tricks" like visualizing animals instead of numbers, but in fact it's the effective use of those techniques that helps them memorize far better than the average fellow. The point is that some things are practically always more memorable.
In particular, concrete nouns, sensory adjectives, visceral actions and terms relevant and descriptive to the subject are inherently more memorable than abstract, generic, irrelevant or nonsensical words. Words that are harder to memorize accurately are also more easily misremembered for synonyms or similar-sounding words.
Finally, when you have a mnemonic device in your domain name, reinforce it. I would never have remembered Silverback if it wasn't for that darned cute gorilla. Even if I couldn't remember the exact name, it's the first result on Google for "gorilla app," which points out another advantage of their naming strategy.
I'm interested in what websites people can never remember. My hypothesis is that their names would mostly be very anti-mnemonic in nature.
You would not believe how few available urls popped up. And most of the availables were something like "sportshit.com" (meant to be sports + hit) which were unused for obvious reasons.