When Google Hates Your Name: Why We Renamed Our Startup

Re:When Google Hates Your Name: Why We Renamed Our Startup by danilocampos on Thursday September 16, 2010 @03:37PM (#1698869)

Sounds like the author had some human-centric reasons for changing the name of the business. It's worth noting that Google can be taught to like invented names in a pretty short amount of time, though.

Three of my four iPhone projects shipped with invented words for names (Oddage, Tallymander, Globejot). Even after the sites were live and indexed, Google would do its "did you mean..." or worse, showing results for the word it thought I meant by default.

So, searching for Tallymander, for example, would give you "Showing results for Sallymander" for the first two results.

With any amount of press or other web conversation that generates inbound links, though, this problem ends up taking care of itself. About a week after launch, Google recognized each word as legitimate and I enjoyed top ranking.

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Re:When Google Hates Your Name: Why We Renamed Our Startup by MartinCron on Thursday September 16, 2010 @03:49PM (#1698908)

Thanks for sharing this experience, the Cadio->Cardio thing was scaring the heck out of me.

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Re:When Google Hates Your Name: Why We Renamed Our Startup by richardhenry on Thursday September 16, 2010 @04:08PM (#1698968)

I found this pretty quickly with Cursebird.

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Re:When Google Hates Your Name: Why We Renamed Our Startup by danilocampos on Thursday September 16, 2010 @04:10PM (#1698974)

Did you mean custard? Showing results for custard. Click here to see results for cursebird.

Ah, Google.

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Re:When Google Hates Your Name: Why We Renamed Our Startup by richardhenry on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @12:23AM (#1711474)

I assume you're joking? If not, let me know.

Here's what myself and most people see: http://cl.ly/2SzP

Interestingly, if you search for "cussbird" it will correct you to "cursebird": http://cl.ly/2TPX

I'm not logged in, and people in the U.S. see the same results.

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Re:When Google Hates Your Name: Why We Renamed Our Startup by jaf656s on Thursday September 16, 2010 @04:05PM (#1698957)

This is determined probabilistically, so as you get more coverage (and links) the term occurs more often on the web, thus making it less likely that it was a misspelling.

I imagine link text might be given more weight over regular text, but I am not sure. Anyone know for sure?

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