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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

At least if it's Haskell's stack build tool, adding the language name to the query makes it pop right up. Not sure if this helps in your case though.

I found your company name in your profile - ":different"

Even if I google ":different" company or without the colon, top results for me is a parfumerie.

When I google different australia, you're the top result.

Surprised New Zealand isn't the top result when you Google "different Australia"

Because it's East Australia

More like Australia is the West Island of NZ.

I thought that different Australia is Austria.

better find a nickname, like D's community did, using dlang lol otherwise no one could find anything on language googling

how hard would it be to learn BASIC using Google? "Basic Programming" is going to have a lot of irrelevant results.

Try it! Nearly every result is related to BASIC. Search engines have gotten very good at guessing what is and isn't a proper noun over the years.

DDG'd

  BASIC programming

all the results were about BASIC, the wiki page to start with, then

* BASIC Programming : 7 Steps - Instructables

* Learn More - Just BASIC

* The History of the BASIC Programming Language

* Programming in BASIC: the absolute beginner tutorial

* FreeBASIC Language | Home

* PureBasic - A powerful BASIC programming language

* Quite BASIC — fun, learning and nostalgia

* World of Spectrum - Documentation - ZX Spectrum manual

Only after all that is a non-basic link

* Introduction | Programming for Beginners

Searched BASIC programming on Google and if also returned results relevant to the actual programming language

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.

BRB: going to SEO spam my simulated annealing NPM library homepage with "heat treatment"...

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.

The Go community had to do the same. Go. A language created by a company that makes a well known search engine.

But by staff who has worked on Plan 9, right?

Sometimes obscurity, as well as tweaking your nose at convention, is a feature.

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.

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.

>I'm well aware it's been discontinued

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.

e.g.

    apple "aperture" color correction before:2016

> 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!

The band Chvrches chose to use the the Roman "u" to spell their name so they'd be easier to search.

Kind of hard to pronounce though. Like that jewellery brand, seemingly pronounced 'buffelgary' or something.

Sorta. It's still pronounced "churches", but it's definitely a common joke to pronounce it chivurches.

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.

Also relevant: "Change Your Name" http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

Worked for Kodak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak#Name

See also "Pages", "Numbers", "Keynote"...

Apple don't give a fuck.

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.

In another era, “+++ATH” would have been a good name.

> Musical albums that liked to have names

The band 'Audiobooks' has taken this to the next level

Anyone else remember "The The"?

(Or for a more modern example "!!!")

I like the band A. When I try to find their music though...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(band)

Don’t go with !!!

You’ll never find them on YouTube or google unless you search for their informal name: chk chk chk

Google have a hardcoded exception for the band "the the".

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".

I always liked to imagine filing "The The" under "The, The".

Of course the right way of filing them is autobiographically... (I went to see the Infected tour with Louise, so they're filed under "L"...)

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.

Terrible Google SEO, great accidental Apple SEO.

I always though the best name for a band with only one album would be 'Various Artists' with 'Greatest Hits' for the album name.

They probably exist, I just don't think I can ask a search engine to find them.

I've seen a band called Special Guests.

"The The" was a pretty notable band in the 80s/90s.

There used to be a local Sydney band called "Free Beer", so the posters for all their support slot gigs would say "$HeadlineAct with Free Beer".

https://www.discogs.com/artist/35584-Various-Artists-3

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

couldn't be any worse than the band names "A" and "My Computer" !

https://acommunication.co.uk

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Computer_(band)

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.

Is it "Colon Blow"?

This just made me laugh so hard. Phil Hartman was great. Here's the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku42Iszh9KM

Launch a multi-million dollar brand advertising campaign.

And I thought Yahoo! (with exclamation mark) had it rough.

At least they're a little better than a hypothetical -"Yahoo" which would return no results for your company at all...

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.

It does that for any "negative term only" search afaict

:oscopy ?

:wq!

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