How Ninite.com (YC W08) was named by a program -- code included

http://blog.ninite.com/post/620277259/how-ninite-was-named-by-a-computer-program

by swies • 16 years ago

81 30 16 years ago

blog.ninite.com

pg2• 16 years ago

The name Viaweb was also generated by a program, though back then (in 1995) practically all domains were still available and it was simply a matter of picking. We were originally called Webgen, but we had to switch because someone else had a site generator called that. So I wrote a program to display all the names consisting of "Web" plus some short English word.

One thing I learned was that most short words are negative or at least excessively blunt. Webpig, Webzit, Webfat, Webdog, etc. But one name the program generated was Webvia. That wasn't so great but if you switched the words it became a reference to the fact that our software worked over the web.

fizx• 16 years ago

Webvia sounds like a member of the pseudo-latin naming scheme still favored by pharmaceutical companies.

andrewljohnson• 16 years ago

When I worked at an ad agency, we used to generate names for things with people. Same sort of strategy though... think up some words that mattered to the brand, brainstorm combinations, and iterate.

I'm not sure why you would get a computer involved though. Why not just take a few minutes and think up words with your team, and then play with them until you have something you like? You can't possibly evaluate unlimited possibilities, so why not scope the games to words, phrases, and ideas that connect in your brain?

zweben• 16 years ago

A program can suggest words or combinations that you might not think of yourself. It helps in the same way that having another person brainstorm with you would help.

rabidsnail• 16 years ago

A program can filter out all of the options whose .com domain names are taken. Otherwise you end up spending a lot of time typing names into your web browser only to find that they're held by a squatter or, worse, a real company.

transmit101• 16 years ago

> One thing I learned was that most short words are negative or at least excessively blunt.

There's an interesting reason for that.

Although English contains elements from numerous languages, it's two primary ancestors are French and the Germanic Anglo-Saxon.

In the middle ages, most of the English peasantry spoke Anglo-Saxon. The nobility, however, all spoke French for several hundred years after William the Conquerer invaded in 1066.

To this day, that ancient split in languages is still obvious. Everyday words in English, including words for animals, household words and swear words, tend to be Germanic: short, guttural and abrupt.

Words to do with civic society, culture and the ruling class are usually from French. They are usually longer and sound more refined. Examples: parliament, judiciary, government, etc.

davnola• 16 years ago

  English is what happens when Norman soldiers pick up Saxon  girls.

[source unknown].

bvi• 16 years ago

This is very interesting. Do you have any sources?

pg2• 16 years ago

While what you're saying is basically true, what it explains is why the earthy words in English are Germanic, not why they're short.

Earthy words are short in French too. "Merde" is as abrupt as "shit." And German is full of long words.

What's really going on is that earthy words tend to be short, whatever their origins. And since English is not so much a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and French as a core of Anglo-Saxon with a veneer of French on top, the earthier, more basic words in English tend to have Anglo-Saxon origins.

gfodor• 16 years ago

Eek. You mentioned people can say your name multiple ways. When naming stuff, I always try to avoid this. Particularly in cases where people's intuition is 50/50 for what is the "right" way to say it, as is the case here.

It will be the chalkboard screetching against your ear for the rest of the life of your company, when new hires, new customers, or colleagues continually pronounce the name "wrong."

jparise• 16 years ago

Those were important considerations when George Eastman named his company "Kodak", as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak#Kodak_name

jeffiel• 16 years ago

Ha, got "feeces"

gstar2• 16 years ago

I'm showing my age, but it used to be uncool to hammer the WHOIS servers. It might pay to use a bit of socket.gethostbyname() to exclude the domain before you hit whois for the final verdict.

Really cool idea, though - impressed with the approach.

OBTW: On your name, in the US does ninite mean "night, night!" or "goodnight" as it does in the UK?

gstar2• 16 years ago

Here's a version that does a socket.gethostbyname before it hits the whois server:

http://d14hvpftrmzdxx.cloudfront.net/namer-ns.py

techiferous• 16 years ago

Yes, here in the US it means that, too. "night, night" was the first thing I thought of.

iaskwhy• 16 years ago

"Search helps, but to most people a website lives at name.com, maybe with a www in front. Our stats seem to reflect this: 60% direct traffic, only 20% search. 17% of those searches are ninite.com or www.ninite.com."

I wonder if the ratio of browser usage for those keywords are the same as the browser usage of site visits. I say this because in Chrome, when there's no link for ninite.com and I select it, it offers me the option to go directly to that link. Every other browser* just lets you copy or search and when I was a Firefox user I searched so I could get a clickable link from Google.

So my point is: is it possible that a large percentage of the searches for "ninite.com" and "www.ninite.com" have that reasoning behind?

* Didn't test in Opera but tested it in IE8, Firefox and Safari.

terrellm2• 16 years ago

I develop a herd management software for cattle ranchers and wanted to call cattle-something. I wrote a program to generate lots of 3 and 4 letter combinations and ended up settling on Max. I checked whois and CattleMax.com was available. 11 years and 56 countries later, it's still going strong and I couldn't imagine any other name for what our product does.

samd• 16 years ago

That's a pretty awesome niche you've got yourself in, and your website/product looks better designed than most industry-specific software I've seen.

terrellm2• 16 years ago

Thanks for the compliment. It's the result of an programmer marrying an ag major and trying to find a career they can enjoy together. We couldn't find one so had to create one.

0nly1ife• 16 years ago

I did something similar when naming my first company (davcro). I was inspired by Adidas, which was derived from the three letter prefixes of the founder's first and last name: Adolf "Adi" Dassler.

derefr• 16 years ago

> A surprising discovery from this name search was that there seems to be a certain name-iness to some words.

A while ago, I was testing just this assumption in the context of writing a plug-in for a writing program (think Scrivener, not TextMate). I spent a few weeks marking words, names and gibberish as "sounds like a character name", "sounds like a coherent proper/common noun that wouldn't do as a character name", or "is gibberish." I then fed this training data (about 100,000 data points) into a bayesian classifier. The results were okay—it would agree with me to about 80% accuracy—but I gave up on it because I didn't know enough about ML to improve the error, and brute-force scoring another 900,000 words myself just to get a possible 5% improvement seemed a bit bleak.

If anyone is interested in the data set, I could dig it out of storage; it's probably heavily biased toward my preferences in what constitutes a "good" name, though (my backup plan, if it turned out to be a completely subjective evaluation, was to get people to do about a hundred ratings through a website, and then cluster their "creative aesthetics" against others' to help them find people to work with.)

mattmaroon• 16 years ago

We did the same thing back when we started draftmix. We put every sports related term we could think of in, then some suffixes just in case, and had a script do this.

You would not believe how few available urls popped up. And most of the availables were something like "sportshit.com" (meant to be sports + hit) which were unused for obvious reasons.

matthew-wegner• 16 years ago

No offense to Ninite, but I think it's a terrible name. I've actually used it three different times, a few months apart each, and I can never remember what it's called. I have to Google for a variety of "Windows installation bundle" terms and end up finding some Lifehacker/etc story...

brianwillis• 16 years ago

My favourite so far has to be "bertse" which sounds kind of whimsical.

philwelch• 16 years ago

It sounds like a mashup of Bert from Sesame Street and goatse to me.

kowen• 16 years ago

I've had some success playing with wordoid.com to come up with "name-ey" or "word-ey" names.

zach• 16 years ago

Okay, so it's a very convenient parametrization to limit the search to a low character length. That way you can score a six-letter domain name, which is bragable. But I think this is a premature optimization.

Hackers (in particular) get hung up on minimizing characters, which is not at all the most important business function of your domain name. Never have I gone to type a long domain name, only to give up halfway through to instead visit a shorter-named alternative, a la Porky Pig.

Domain naming should instead seek to increase memorability, enable verbal communication of the name, strike a proper emotional tone, and avoid spelling ambiguities. If that happens to result in a ten-letter domain name, you know what? It's okay. Nobody cares how short your name is if they've forgotten it.

It occurs to me that to increase memorability, we should take a cue from mnemonics. People tend to be squeamish about mnemonic devices. Have you heard of these memory competitions where people memorize the order of a deck of cards? You would think that the people with superhuman memories have no need for "silly tricks" like visualizing animals instead of numbers, but in fact it's the effective use of those techniques that helps them memorize far better than the average fellow. The point is that some things are practically always more memorable.

In particular, concrete nouns, sensory adjectives, visceral actions and terms relevant and descriptive to the subject are inherently more memorable than abstract, generic, irrelevant or nonsensical words. Words that are harder to memorize accurately are also more easily misremembered for synonyms or similar-sounding words.

Finally, when you have a mnemonic device in your domain name, reinforce it. I would never have remembered Silverback if it wasn't for that darned cute gorilla. Even if I couldn't remember the exact name, it's the first result on Google for "gorilla app," which points out another advantage of their naming strategy.

I'm interested in what websites people can never remember. My hypothesis is that their names would mostly be very anti-mnemonic in nature.

nanijoe• 16 years ago

I'd never heard of Ninite the YC company until this post..on the other hand, I think I hear the word every night , when my daughter is telling me good night. I'm not sure I would have picked that domain name if I ere in their shoes, since to most people , the nite in Ninite might indicate that the company has something to do with night time, which it does not.

gphil• 16 years ago

One of the first results I got back from this script is "guiism." I'm surprised that hasn't been snapped up by any designers out there.

ntoshev• 16 years ago

When you get ngrams from a dictionary as opposed to a real text, you do not account for the different frequencies of the words. You might get better results with ngrams calculated from plain text.

How Ninite.com (YC W08) was named by a program -- code included

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