That was my first thought on that one as well. While in theory I don't think the final search product will be related to Epik in any significant way, why choose a name that adds to the overall "Uni" brandscape? If it was a decisively better name than all the others then maybe. Or if the "Uni" portion of the brand gave a significant on-target image to the targeted brand vision, but that isn't the case even if Uni is otherwise a good prefix and the combined Uni+Crawl has great word-flow.
The problem with Incogne is that it's too awkward to say (it's the -gne at the end). It doesn't flow off the tongue easily at all. Also while it doesn't necessarily completely fail the radio test, the fact it's awkward to say will mean that there will be a portion of people who just won't bother to try simply because they assume they'll get it wrong.
It's not bad at all. Not as phonetically strong as Toki, but still decent. A little more contextual to some maybe, but I personally really don't see any significant relation between "searching" and "surfing" in terms of branding imagery. In fact .. I always thought of Internet "
surfing" as just randomly jumping around from site to site, so in fact, the exact opposite of targeted searching. That being said, while I don't give the name any extra points because it contains "surf", I don't really take anything away as I think most will see it more of a random brand .. and when looked at in terms of a random brand, while not spectacular, it's still far better than most of the other choices, so a name I would potentially include in a follow up round if there is one.
Have you looked into ASSE.com .. with a silent E? lol
Unfortunately Neo is also too strongly associated with the term NeoNazi.
Not a bad name at all .. certainly better than many of the ones listed. Not top notch phonetically, but still not too bad on that front .. however the -ator and ater alternate spelling suffixes is actually the biggest thing against it. Although admittedly that never stopped "Gator" domains from becoming extremely popular.
This is definitely a 2 syllable domain with too many alternate spellings (radio test failure).
Otherwise, if your argument is that the "ue" portion is silent, then the name is even less appropriate as silent letters on a made up word unfortunately results in a 0% grade on the radio test.
I will agree with you on that .. I like double O's in brandables .. unfortunately in this case it's the "ue" end of the domain that really hurts this candidate.
What's fast about "Cow" is that it only takes 3 characters to spell it .. lol. I also don't think the imagery of a cow is too negative .. they are slow animals, but nobody hates them and they can make for a fun image .. unfortunately I think the drawback here is that it might be seen as one of Tucows many projects. Which despite "SearchCow" actually being a decent name, for the same reasoning as UniSearch, for me it kinda takes it out of the running if it's to be in Epik's overall portfolio.
Radio test failure unfortunately.
I really like the sound of Querch. But there are too many potential alternate spellings. Namely the most obvious Quearch/Kearch (if the implication is that it's to be partially derived from "search"), but then also Kerch, Kursh, Curch.
As I previously mentioned, I definitely agree on this point. However the fact it's only 4 letters and so phonetically strong does offset that considerably.
When it comes to brandables containing acronyms, it's imperative that the acronym portion be 100% obvious to virtually the entirety of the target market. So there's definitely an issue there. Also the "chain" part is a technical term that pretty much everyone not into crypto will not see the context here.
I agree that single syllable domains should be given significant bonus points for such a project .. particularly given the potential budget making it an actual possibility. I think the issue with Zuwk is that most would spell it Zewk, or even Zuke. Yoxt is a single syllable 4L as well and actually passes the radio test .. maybe it's the phonetics of "oxt" that gave people a hard time, otherwise I can't think of a reason why it only has 2% of voters supporting it. While Toki is 2 syllables, they flow extremely well together and result in a very strong sounding still very short brand. Although IMO .. "Toki it" = Fail, "Yoxt it" = Fail and "Zuwk it" = Pass .. but not sure how much strength Rob is giving to the "verbability" requirement .. doesn't appear to be a requirement given the list of candidates. I actually submitted a short fun fast and techie sounding 5-letter single-syllable domain that does pass the "verbability test", but was a little late with emailing it to
@Rob Monster.
With Searchful, even if it's only 2 syllables it just seems a little too long and flowery/fanciful as opposed to something fast/techie (for lack of a more scientific reasoning .. lol). More importantly, it's one of the few domains that compares very well to SearchIt, where SearchIt is obviously a much stronger candidate.
I agree with you on the majority of them. But the two most popular choices (Toki and SearchIt), while having a couple other relatively minor potential issues, are very strong phonetically.
In the end, of all the domains considered so far, I still think SearchIt and Toki are the 2 strongest choices. But both have very different pros/cons (mostly pros for both) of their own .. not an obvious choice between the two. The only other names I'd have considered are Jaroo, Yoxt and possibly Surfa.
