Forget Rand Paul, Let's Talk Paul Rand | Hacker News Reader

Forget Rand Paul, Let's Talk Paul Rand

us9.campaign-archive2.com

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Google's job is to show the search results that most closely match what users are actually looking for. In 2015, far more Google users are looking for Rand Paul than Paul Rand. Would that it weren't so, but it is. Paul Rand's logos might touch millions of people every day, but Rand himself is not relevant to the majority of Google users.

That's what I came to say. The job of Google is to interpret and return relevant results. If you're looking for the designer, then you'll need to tack on 'designer' to the search.

I was watching one of those 'investor pitch TV shows' on TV, and a young girl was pitching her site, which was named using a misspelled word (presumably to secure a domain name otherwise unavailable). If I was on that panel, I would have told her to go back to the start and find a new name and branding. She even admitted on the show that she wasn't turning up in results because of auto-correct spelling.

These days, you can't pick company names or brands that closely match something else. You are better off starting with a completely new word than trying to misspell something slightly.

I enjoyed this piece as sort of a tongue-in-cheek way to justify this article's existence -- if more people read or link to this article, it might end up showing higher in Google's results :)

The problem is that even when you put "Paul Rand" in quotes, the search results still show "Rand Paul" half the time.

This is ever the problem of general purpose data handling systems. They optimize for popularity not for some kind of domain desirability.

I'd say that Google's job is to show the search results that _each_ user is actually looking for. (Not an aggregate user with 2.5 children.)

Come to think of it, doesn't Google aspire to personalized search? But in any case, at least I'd like old-fashioned quoted search -- i.e. I want "this phrase" exactly -- to give useful results.

I didn't think phrase matching (quotes) was ever broken? I know Google dropped the "+" filter a while back, but I still continue to use phrase matching quite heavily, and it seems to still work as it always has.

The string matching is fuzzy though. It is case insensitive and it ignores at least some non-alphanumeric characters.

For example, "twenty-four" will return results about the TV show "Twenty Four" as well as results for "twenty four" and "twenty-four".

There's some other maddening exceptions for those who would prefer exact string matching, but I can't remember them all and it's changed over the years too.

I think it does. After clicking this article, my top four search results for Paul Rand (without quotes) were the designer.

Moreover, the top results I see -- under a paid ad for Rand Paul -- are paul-rand.com, his wikipedia page, and a right-hand panel about Paul Rand. Is it so terrible that some other of the ten blue links are for people who confuse the two? Is there another vital Paul Rand result Google is missing?

I get:

  (Sidebar: Paul Rand)
  Paul Rand
  Paul Rand
  Rand Paul
  Rand Paul
  (News: Rand Paul)
  Paul Rand
  Paul Rand
  Paul Rand
  Paul Rand
  Rand Paul
  Paul Rand
  Rand Paul

So... 8/12 or 75% of the first page of results are Paul Rand. Plus a thing underneath the sidebar saying "See results for Rand Paul".

That's seriously not a disservice.

Author. One point I want to add here: If you're looking for news articles about Paul Rand, you'll be sorely disappointed.

Even in quotes—where the exact phrase is supposed to show up—most of the articles are about Rand Paul. That points to algorithmic issues.

But at the same time, it's worth noting that the other examples of this issue I cite—in the case of Siri and Bing—are even more troubling, because they seem to drown out the figure entirely. Based on a search of Bing in incognito mode, no searches, I found that "paul rand" in quotes brought up 80 percent Rand Paul. Siri only brings up one result for "Who is Paul Rand," and it brings up the Wikipedia page for Rand Paul.

I realize people are going to disagree about the thesis of the article, but I think my goal here was to point out that problems like these exist—and are likely to become more common over time. Thanks for engaging.

> The logo is hard to read at a distance

What?? No, it's literally 4 letters with a flame above it, it can't get much simpler.

I didn't really agree with that point either. I don't care much for the aesthetic but it's pretty recognizable at that size.

"You may have to squint to get the message that it's trying to get across"

I think he's referring specifically to the torch imagery. From far away it mostly just looks like a word with a dot above it. The torch deal is small in comparison to the letters.

Author here—yep, this was my intention. Sure, you can make out the letters, but the liberty imagery is lost if you're looking from half a mile. Look at the Obama logo (for example), and it holds up better. The Hillary logo, for all its faults, will similarly hold up better at long distances because the imagery is simple.

I think he meant recognize at a distance

What is a logo for a political campaign good for? It is used to try to create some kind of positive impression on voters based on the visual design. Visual marketing in general is about trying to hack the human brain's bugs in order to influence it. Their is little actual information that is communicated, it is all about manipulating the lizard brain. This kind of hacking is awful for democracy. Voters should be encouraged to use their rational brains as much as possible when making these decisions. I consider it immoral and think it should be frowned upon.

I am genuinely surprised to learn that Rand Paul is not named after Ayn Rand.

His name was Randy, which he shortened to Rand when he got married, at the behest of his wife. There could be some tenuous connection to Ayn Rand, but he has not acknowledged it. He definitely knows about Ayn Rand and her philosophy, as does his dad (Ron Paul).

To be more precise, at least according to his father, his name is "Randall". "Randy" is a nickname, as is "Rand".

Ah okay. Then I'll bet an oak tree against an acorn that he adopted the nickname as an allusion to Ayn Rand.

Do Presidential candidates usually have logos? Before today I didn't know Rand Paul had one. In fact, the only one I had seen other than Hillary's was Obama's.

George W. Bush had the blocky "BUSH" with an American flag coming out of the "W." above it. That's as much of a logo as Rand Paul's.

Nowadays, most of them do. Romney had the funky R that you probably forgot about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitt_Romney_presidential_campa...

Don't you have a logo?

If you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on what is essentially a marketing campaign, it would be rather shocking not to have a logo.

Doing some image searching, it looks like Clinton in 1992 was the first to have consistent branding.

Rand had a cool limited bumper sticker silhouette with just his first name, like this. Seemed like good branding-http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5522b0ec6da811ae3f3...

Where is his first name? I don't see it in this image.

He linked an unrelated image. The one he was talking about is this one:

https://store.randpaul.com/get.php/media/catalog/product/cac...

Thanks, I'd actually never seen that one.

Even as a general supporter of Rand, that silhouette logo, to me, looks a little more "Satan" than "Mad Men".

I think the most interesting point is that the logo was crowd sourced (and used SVG) which I didn't know before. The logo seems fine to me but the process is pretty exciting.

The author of the blog post seems to think the crowd sourcing is not the greatest idea and it should be "left to the pros". I disagree with that general sentiment, why shouldn't wisdom of the crowds also apply to design tasks? At the very least it's dismessed a bit too quickly.

Hi, author here. I'm not personally opposed to the idea of crowdsourcing, nor the idea of changing a logo as needed—I respect Rand Paul for doing this, actually.

But I was writing that section of the piece with the assumption that _Paul Rand_ might not like it, considering that some of his commentary near the end of his life (in the early age of computers) questioned the negative effects that democratized design, specifically through desktop publishing, had on visual identity.

Design has gotten better online in recent years, and many more people are handy at Photoshop/InDesign than they were two decades ago, but this philosophy was one common in the early desktop publishing age, when people commonly screwed up things like kerning, typographers' quotes, and so on.

> This is a situation where someone who has had more influence on millions more lives than Rand Paul ever might

There's a statement I'd love to see quantified.

Very interesting. Great designs. Now I know who is Paul Rand and hopefully, a little more aboutt the importance of logo design.

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