Choosing a name for a search engine  nowadays can be troublesome. Most good names are already taken even if they are just blocked by a cyber squatter. Sometimes you are lucky and can get your name in a domain name auction or on eBay. Worst case you have established an audience and them someone shows up claiming that your name is to similar. This happened recently to the semantic search engine Queap as another start up called qeep was crawling up from under some stone and claimed that Queap sounded to similar to “their” start up product name.

Another case from the past was a (German) software company which produced software for dentists. They started their business and filed all the necessary company documents with the registration offices. In addition they did the mandatory publishing for the company but they forgot to get a trademark for their name. About six month later the business was blooming and they looked into a bright future when a letter from a lawyer informed them that they where using a name which was the trademark property of someone else. The other party just had registered the name after the mandatory publishing had been done. About 30.000 USD later they owned their name. If they would have registered it right away about 1% of that cost would have done it.

Other start ups have chosen names from other languages like Ubuntu (a Zulu word) and Jomlaa (a phonetic spelling for a Swahili word). However, even when choosing a name from a not so common language the still go further a call something JeOS that is a phonetic version of the word “Juice”. A phonetic name can also raise problems if your audience is not capable to type in your domain name by just hearing it once. Some advice is to reserve also all the misspelled domain names which are similar to your product name but just misspelled. For searching misspelled product names in eBay there are services available which might can give you a first impression what you could do.

Besides having the creativity to come up with a good name, it is important to get all the important domains registered. Therefore, if you are not into minority languages nobody knows or can pronounce you might go with a phonetic version of a word from your own language. However, as strange minds think alike you might have the problem that some of the domains are taken.

In addition, you have to be aware that going with a foreign word or phonetic malapropism you might run into a problem that this word has a bad meaning in some other languages.

There are numerous examples like:
•    Rolls Royce Silver Mist – Mist in German has the meaning of manure
•    Mitsubish Pajero – well the best translation term for Pajero in Spanish is wanker
•    Mazda MX5 – the MX2 could be pronounced like the french word for sh*t

However, not only car manufactures run into this problem. Some from the internet are publishit.com (sh*t), expertsexchange.com (sex) or Pocari Sweat a soft drink from Japan. Especially in Japan, you find product names, which are somewhat unusable outside of Japan – especially as they use a foreign language / writing that it fits their ears and aesthetic feeling.

So what to do if you want to choose a name for your new internet product? Well spend money on it, get it trademarked and make sure that you can grab all necessary domain names. In addition have make sure that the name does not have a bad meaning in other countries you might want to do business with. Ancient historic names of, e.g., Egyptian gods seem to be available or smaller or minority languages might be a good guess.

Steffen Schilke is a staff writer for AltSearchEngines.

This is in response to our Call for Papers.

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