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discuss Brand name testing for Anonymous Smart Search aggregator

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Which names do you prefer for an Anonymous Smart Search engine?

  • 1st

    SearchIt.com

    60 
    votes
    40.8%
  • 2nd

    Toki.com

    38 
    votes
    25.9%
  • 3rd

    Decrawl.com

    27 
    votes
    18.4%
  • 4th

    Searchful.com

    votes
    5.4%
  • 5th (tie)

    Incogne.com

    votes
    4.8%
  • 5th (tie)

    Vesh.com

    votes
    4.8%
  • 5th (tie)

    Unicrawl.com

    votes
    4.8%
  • 6th

    AskSite.com

    votes
    4.1%
  • 7th

    Brung.com

    votes
    3.4%
  • 8th (tie)

    Searchcow.com

    votes
    2.7%
  • 8th (tie)

    NetNut.com

    votes
    2.7%
  • 9th (tie)

    Updig.com

    votes
    2.0%
  • 9th (tie)

    Jaroo.com

    votes
    2.0%
  • 9th (tie)

    Yoxt.com

    votes
    2.0%
  • 9th (tie)

    Lookue.com

    votes
    2.0%
  • 10th

    Qhain.com

    votes
    1.4%
  • 11th

    Zuwk.com

    vote
    0.7%

Rob Monster

Founder of EpikTop Member
Epik Founder
Impact
18,389
Epik has been developing a series of new platforms including Anonymize.com, Armored.net, Us.Tv, Watchmask.com, and more on the way.

Recently, Epik has been developing an Anonymous Smart Search aggregator. This new brand is intended to power an alternative to Google.com, Bing.com and DuckDuckGo as a domainer-friendly and censorship-light search engine. You can see a preview here. We have also been inviting name suggestions here.

This is a poll of a reduced set of submitted candidates to screen for the top-4 to be poll-tested outside of NamePros to select the finalist.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Searchit and BRUNG .. Both options look quite attractive!
 
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ChainDS.jpg

I'm disappointed my entry Chainds.com didn't make the list, as I think it's a fantastic brandable, short (7L) memorable and pronouncable. Short for Chain (D)omain (S)earch, Chainds.com I think would have gotten some "love" or like here at NamePros! In the meantime, I voted for SearchIT, a great name for this project!
 
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I see searchit listed withn a min offer of $32.5K, hopefully the buyer, and seller can agree on a price.
 
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At that time "LE" was popular [AppLe (t)] GoogLe (Googol + Goggle)
 
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is there an 18th option?
 
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A very important question is who is the target end user market?

Is it just the small sub-set of people who are heavily into Alt-Tech? Or do you want to reach out to the much larger global audience where the majority of people don't know and don't care about terms such as decentralisation etc?

If it's the later (which I think ultimately should be if you want the most possible users), then that really disqualifies DeCrawl and Incogne, which I unfortunately would say aren't the best of brands to begin with,

While it's fun to have animal imagery, SearchCow will end up sharing namespace with internet heavyweight Tucows.

I really like Toki as a brand. Seems a bit of a shame it doesn't already have a home in the crypto space (Tokens) .. seems like the absolutely perfect name for a crypto mascot! Some could argue that it doesn't quite pass the radio test (Toky, Tokie, Tockie, Tokey, etc), but the brevity of 4 characters really offsets that a lot and it is quite memorable and phonetically strong

Without listing them all, the phonetics of many of the brandables just aren't very strong enough to ever get viral traction in a niche that's already very established with huge brands.

Jaroo is one of the exceptions to that and actually is nice and clear. I have several 5L brandables with double "oo" as I like the logo potential of using eyes or a smiley.

I really liked your requirement of having the brand sound like a verb .. I thought it was extremely smart and forward looking ... unfortunately almost all of the candidates fail that test.

One of the few that doesn't is Vesh .. although unfortunately the phonetics of that make it something to reconsider .. lol .. "Vesh it" > "Vesh*t" > "Veh-Sh*t"

That bring us to "Search It" .. a very strong choice IMO. Although one big factor to consider is that it will never be trademarkable in the context of a search engine. Meaning that you will never be able to stop Google or anyone else from advertising "Search-It on Google". However, owning the trademark isn't an absolute must depending on the context and your business objectives. Almost all "Keyword Domains" have that same issue, but that doesn't stop many from doing extremely well. Also, because it is overly generic and so exact on what you're doing, as a brand, you'd pretty much always need to use the full "SearchIt.com", making it a little longer than you were hoping for. Again though, the domain is so specific that the overall benefits could outshine the little issues against it.


Overall I'd say by far the 2 best choices (in no particular order) are SearchIt and Toki. I'm really sorry to everyone else, but the rest really don't come anywhere close. Forced to choose a 3rd would actually be Jaroo mainly because the other choices really aren't strong phonetically or for other important reasons. If your target audience is exclusively those deeply into Alt-Tech then I suppose DeCrawl could be something to consider, but to someone even middle ground in Alt-Tech awareness, the "De" is a negative and at first I really didn't even get the significance of the name until I saw someone talk about it above.

Thanks @Ategy.com for the generous and thoughtful commentary.

Now that Epik acquired your FullVenue.com and we have had some different discussions I am reminded yet again that you are more than a domain investor but also a thoughtful observer and commentator on human behavior and branding.

As for target audience, it is absolutely intended for the mainstream. The Alt-Tech community may be among the early adopters as they are the most frustrated by the status quo, but ultimately it should have the capacity to be a mainstream alternative.
 
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For long term branding, I would only consider a pronounceable 4 Letter .com preferably a one syllable, for that reason I choose:

ZUWK

That's one of the problems I see with DuckDuckGo, is their name, it's too long and you would never hear someone say, just "DuckDuck It" when they want to search something.

2nd choice would be outside of a 4 letter and be SearchIt and then 3rd would be Searchful, but both of those are fairly long, although self explanatory
 
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I went with DeCrawl.

Decentralization is here to stay. DeCrawl has a great blockchain emphasis.
 
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I voted Toki. Easy to remember, easy to spell, easy to brand.

The others such as AskSite.com are way too generic, forgettable and boring.

I like four letter pronounceable domains.

I was going to submit DUNR.com (Done Right) but I did not think it was necessarily the right fit so I did not submit it.

So from the list TOKI sounds the best to me.

I agree with @Tia Wood
 
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For me, toss up between Toki and SearchIt

Toki is a cool, fun/short brand, was also an old video game I liked back in the NES/SNES era.

SearchIt makes perfect sense and is pretty short as well. ppl won't forget that one.
 
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I would restart the list, if you are seriously taking on google and similar.

One of the requirements for a search brand is how it works as a verb. You can easily say "I googled it" "I binged it".

Would be hard to say "I searchited it" or "tokied it".
 
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i did not vote. i went through all 17 several times ,sounding them out and i did not like any of them.
 
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For long term branding, I would only consider a pronounceable 4 Letter .com preferably a one syllable, for that reason I choose:

ZUWK

That's one of the problems I see with DuckDuckGo, is their name, it's too long and you would never hear someone say, just "DuckDuck It" when they want to search something.

2nd choice would be outside of a 4 letter and be SearchIt and then 3rd would be Searchful, but both of those are fairly long, although self explanatory
DuckDuckGo acquired Duck.com
 
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Now that Epik acquired your FullVenue.com and we have had some different discussions I am reminded yet again that you are more than a domain investor but also a thoughtful observer and commentator on human behavior and branding.
As for target audience, it is absolutely intended for the mainstream. The Alt-Tech community may be among the early adopters as they are the most frustrated by the status quo, but ultimately it should have the capacity to be a mainstream alternative.
That's effectively what I though .. unfortunately in my opinion, that really effectively makes a few choices non-starters.

One of the requirements for a search brand is how it works as a verb. You can easily say "I googled it" "I binged it".
Would be hard to say "I searchited it" or "tokied it".
"Toke It" / "Toked It"? ;)

DeCrawl has a great blockchain emphasis.
That's why I unfortunately don't think it's a good choice for what @Rob Monster is doing. His base following and early adopters will likely be aware of those terms .. but he'll never go mainstream or get any viral growth with a name based on a niche with relatively small awareness by the general population.
 
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That's effectively what I though .. unfortunately in my opinion, that really effectively makes a few choices non-starters.


"Toke It" / "Toked It"? ;)


That's why I unfortunately don't think it's a good choice for what @Rob Monster is doing. His base following and early adopters will likely be aware of those terms .. but he'll never go mainstream or get any viral growth with a name based on a niche with relatively small awareness by the general population.

There is no way to build a search engine that doesn't crawl. So, the name is meaningless for its business.
 
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I voted for Toki.com and SearchIt.com for the obvious reasons. Mentioned by many already.
 
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There is no way to build a search engine that doesn't crawl. So, the name is meaningless for its business.
Yeah .. but my point is that the general population have no clue what crawling is. So even if indeed you are correct that the search results are based on web crawling, 95% of @Rob Monster's eventual target audience (general population) have no clue the significance of "Crawling" and "Decentralisation" to the actual tool they'll use .. so a technical based brand name like that will be meaningless to most of the people he wants to attract to the service.

The attributes of a search engine you'd possibly want to highlight in a brand are speed, reliability, practicality, accuracy, being better than the competition, etc.
 
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ever go mainstream or get any viral growth with a name based on a niche with relatively small awareness by the general population.

I get your point. Although, it's good to be ahead of the curve with branding sometimes. The idea of Decentralization, or "De" for short, is growing rapidly. Your right about it not being mainstream yet, although it's going in that direction, very quickly.

I can remember when the entire internet was NOT mainstream. It wasn't long ago. What is not mainstream today, can be mainstream tomorrow. For branding purposes I tend to look towards tomorrow and not today.

Don't Google it, Don't Duck it, DeCrawl it!

Imo......

(I got no skin in this game and do not know who owns ANY of the domains. I wish all entrants the best.)
 
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