A while ago, in a post about picking website URLs, I said your URL shouldn’t be a generic description of what you do. I gave the examples “Yahoo” or “Google” is better than “searchengine.com”.
Why is that and how far does that principle apply?
It applies widely.
If your name is descriptive of an existing category of products or services, you minimize the chance of establishing a brand or even having anyone remember your name. Your name is already owned by the category and probably by a particular brand in that category!
To take this to an extreme, imagine GM coming out with a new small car called “The Small Car.”
Actually…. Do you remember a car called the GLC (Great Little Car)?
I didn’t think so.
There actually was such a car. I can’t remember who made it. And I just tried searching to find out and found nothing except pages about Hondas, Mazdas, etc.
See the point?
Now one of the important considerations in this is “existing category of products or services.”
So Google and Yahoo – since there already was such a thing as a search engine – were smart to name their services as they did. And all the search engines with descriptive names like “searchsite” and “sitesearch” and whatever…. are nowhere.
On the other hand, when IBM came out with the PC, there was barely such a thing as a personal computer. Do note however that IBM doesn’t even make PCs any more.