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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I agree with Marc. Google is a mediocre name.

But it's a lot better than "Wesabe". "Wesabe" looks like "wasabi", which is completely irrelevant. (You can pull off irrelevance if you spell the name right--"Apple"? But misspelling plus irrelevance is pretty bad.) And I don't know how to pronounce it. How do I tell my friends about it? Google doesn't sound like anything (except "googol", which trivia buffs and nerds know is a large number but is otherwise unknown) and you know how to pronounce it, even before it got popular.

Not a lot better. Possibly no better. But certainly much worse than "Excite" or "Yahoo," whose lunches Google ate. That's my point here.

My point here is that "Google" attains a level of adequacy that "Wesabe" doesn't seem to, for the reasons I pointed out.

Past adequacy, I agree that "Google" was a worse brand than its competitors and that it didn't matter.

It sounds like goggles, and goggling - ie looking. It also means the large number 'googl' 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - vast scale. It's not meaningless, and does relate to their product.

The google brand and message - with its single input box, and 'just search' focus was awesome.

Wesabe is a completely wrong name on so many levels for a financial company. Any decent branding consultant would have told them that.

Google sounds like goggles? I'm not sure I have heard someone suggest that, nor do 99% of Google users know about the mathematical significance of the name. I think it is a good name because it is simple, unique, easily spelled and the name of the best search engine for the last 10 years.

Pointing to Google is such a non-argument, in my opinion. What does it prove? That you can succeed with a mediocre name, not that picking a good brand doesn't matter. I don't like it when people say "Google does X, so it must be fine". Google is a much better name than Wesabe, anyway. Of course picking a good brand helps. Will it make or break your company? No.

What does it prove? That you can succeed with a mediocre name, not that picking a good brand doesn't matter.

That is what I intended it to prove.

I agree that brands are overrated (not with their complete irrelevance), but the Google argument doesn't prove anything. There is a huge difference in people's willingness to try a new search engine, compared to many other applications. Particularly when it comes to sites that deal with your money. That makes people conservative and want something recognizable.

> There is a huge difference in people's willingness to try a new search engine, compared to many other applications.

Sure people were willing to try new search engines... until Google came along and built a better one.

Point is, branding takes a back seat to product quality, and the companies in question were clearly leagues apart in terms of quality. If they were of a similar quality, or if instead of "Wesabe" it was called "xXxVirus39" you would have a point. But that's not the case, so you've got your work cut out for you if you want to make a convincing argument that the brand played a relatively significant role here.

In addition, let us remember that Google is a misspelling as well for "Googol".

I've never understood why people tend to bring this up. If anything it shows that the misspelling was a more natural way to transcribe that specific string of sounds. Perhaps had the person who registered the domain looked up the proper spelling, word-of-mouth marketing would've been impaired, and people might have generally had a tougher time spelling the name correctly in their address bar.

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