Namescape: Search Engines

Here is a selection of search engine names plotted in a competitive namescape grid, ranked by relative value from 0 (worst) to 5 (best). See below for a detailed explanation.

	DESCRIPTIVE	INVENTED	EXPERIENTIAL	EVOCATIVE
5		Google		Yahoo!	5
4					4
3		Bing	AltaVista HotBot SideStep	Hummingbird Kayak Northern Light Sphinx Wink	3
2	Wolfram Alpha	Alexa Clusty Lycos Mahalo Rollyo Tapu Trexy	AnyWho About.com Ask ChaCha Excite Galaxy Go Jumper OpenText Zoominfo	Dogpile Grub Mamma Spock	2
1	AllTheWeb Answers.com Info.com Sciencenet	Blekko Coveo Funnelback Grokker ISYS Kartoo Lucene Mobissimo Namazu Nutch Tanganode TeraText TREX Vivisimo Zabasearch	AskMeNow Brainboost ChunkIt! DeeperWeb Dieselpoint eHow ex.plode.us Harvester42 GigaBlast MegaSpider MetaGopher Monster Crawler Myriad Search OmniFind Seeks SharePoint Supercrawler Surfwax SWISH-E Turbo10 WireDoo	DuckDuckGo InfoTiger LeapFish Terrier	1
0	Concept Searching Limited DataparkSearch dtSearch Finding-People.com iSearch Live QnA LiveSearch Metscrawler MetaLib SearchPort Secure Enterprise Search WebCrawler X1 Enterprise Search	Cuil Endeca Eurekster Exalead Faroo Gonzui Inbenta Ixquick Krozilo Lexxe mnoGoSearch Xapian YaCy Yebol Zettair	Expert System Fast Search & Transfer ht://Dig OpenFTS Powerset What-U-Seek		0
	DESCRIPTIVE	INVENTED	EXPERIENTIAL	EVOCATIVE

Name Value:The five levels of the vertical axis represent the relative value of a given name, ranked from a low of 0 value to a max of 5. The Value ranking is of course subjective, but it is derived from factors such as how engaging a name is with its target audience; how many layers of meaning, story, myth, metaphor, imagery the name has; associations, imagery, multiple layers; how memorable the name is; and how differentiated from the competition the name is.

Descriptive Names: Descriptive names are purely descriptive of what a company or product does or its function. They might also take the form of an acronym or the names of the company founders.

Invented Names: This category of names includes the purely invented, the morphemic mash-up, and foreign words that are not widely known to English speakers. At their best, Invented names can be poetic, rhythmic and ripe for investing with the soul of a brand (think Google).

Experiential Names: These are names that map to the experience of using a product or service, or to what a company does, or to an aspect of human experience. This category also includes all the generic adjective-based names, such as Advanced, Superior, Vantage, Smart, Super, Ultra, Mega, etc. Experiential names are usually literal, and are the types of names often created by cross-referencing a vision statement with a thesaurus.

Evocative Names: These are names that map metaphorically, rather than literally, to the brand positioning. Evocative names rise above the goods and services being offered, and paint a bigger picture. The best of them tap into a deep reservoir of shared cultural knowledge, myth, story, imagery, association, legend and art, and usually work on multiple levels. Nearly all the greatest brands that you are familiar with have evocative names.

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During the competitive analysis phase of a naming project, we plot the company, product or service names of a given market sector on a competitive namescape grid like this one, which becomes a useful reference document of the competitive name reality facing your brand. This helps everyone on your naming team understand what types of names are overused in your market sector and what territory is ripe for exploration if you want to differentiate your brand from the competition.

We encourage you to print out this Namescape grid and play around with how the names are classified. It’s an exercise that will get you thinking about the names in your own market space, which you can map out yourself with this blank namescape chart.