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Re:Ask YC: Domain Names: Better to be clear or witty? by jcl on Tuesday June 24, 2008 @12:16PM (#226383)
If you look past the incredible success of its products, "Google" is not a great name. It's only witty to math nerds; to the public at large, it's just a nonsense word, unrelated to internet search, and not all that memorable. Its saving graces are that it's short and sounds like a plausible verb. AOL and Yahoo! both had much better names but inferior products.

Google was also fortunate to be early in the trend of nonsense/misspelled domain names. The recent ones are largely forgettable. If you are thinking of going this route, I'd suggest making the name at least tangentially related to the site's function; reddit and flickr do this and are IMHO great names, short and memorable... wufoo and meebo, not so much.

Re:Ask YC: Domain Names: Better to be clear or witty? by fdschoeneman on Tuesday June 24, 2008 @04:52PM (#226810)
I disagree strongly with you on this. Google is a great name, better than all the examples you've mentioned for one simple reason: How many times have you been lost and called a friend and asked her to google an address for you? How many times have you googled a girl you met to see where she works of if she has any pictures you can send to your friends?

Back when Yahoo was the only game in town for search, nobody ever aked me to Yahoo something.

Flickr is a great product with an easy to mis-spell name.

Reddit is good, though.

Regards,

Fred