« Livin' la vida Local | Main | Buzz on Political Daughters »

August 30, 2004

About That Name...

When this blog launched, several folks asked about the name. They read it as "why search blog?" and wondered why we picked such an odd name.

Well, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. At least in the engineering ranks, there are two ways that we name new products. But this really only applies to internal "products" and code names. Every product name that the world sees on yahoo.com is, of course, scrutinized by our dear friends in Marketing.

Method #1: Be Creative
Pick something you like and find a way to make it apply to whatever it is you are naming. Bonus points if it sounds plausible. An example of this was My Yahoo!. One of the core pieces of technology behind My Yahoo! is known internally as "Idaho."

That's right, Idaho. It has absolutely nothing to do with potatoes either. No, Idaho comes from the B-52's. You see, they had this popular song called "Private Idaho" and My Yahoo! is all about giving each person his or her own personal start page -- their own private Idaho.

There are examples like that all over the company: planets, Star Wars characters, and so on.

Method #2: Be Lazy
Those generally lacking in creative inspiration (in other words, "many of the engineers") have taken to just sticking a "y" on the beginning of something and then declaring it "a Yahoo! thing." Obviously, this requires no brainpower at all and results in a lot of similar sounding names.

I think you can see where the name ysearchblog came from now, can't you? :-)

Jeremy Zawodny
Technical Yahoo!

Permalink | Bookmark | del.icio.us | digg | Filed In: Meta

Comments

Plus, calling it the yScript would have sent too many people screaming into the bay.

Posted by: jr | August 30, 2004 08:18 PM

OK now instead of typing
mail.yahoo.com
calendar.yahoo.com
drive.yahoo.com

why not making it more simple and trying to get ymail.com, ycalendar.com, ydrive.com ?

Posted by: Guillaume | August 30, 2004 10:41 PM

You know, I've often thought it'd be hand if we had the various "y" domain names and use them as redirects to the real Yahoo services.

Jeremy

Posted by: Jeremy Zawodny | August 30, 2004 10:53 PM

I think it would've been much more simpler if you sticked with the bunch (e.g. mail.yahoo.com, finance.yahoo.com, calendar.yahoo.com, games.yahoo.com, messenger.yahoo.com) and made the blog's default address to http://blog.yahoo.com.

Because to be honest, when I first heard the news that Yahoo! has launched a blog, I did think it was available on blog.yahoo.com. Not until I read the whole post (through John Battelle) did I realize it was actually on its own domain, ysearchblog.com.

Also, I see that blog.yahoo.com redirects to groups.yahoo.com, why is that?

Posted by: Sid Yadav | August 31, 2004 01:10 AM

Why not combine the two methods into one:

The Method: Be Creatively Lazy
Pick something you like, then just add a y in front of it.

By combining the two methods into one, you can cut down on the number of keystrokes it takes to explain the methods. :-)

Posted by: Scott Niven | August 31, 2004 04:42 AM

Some suggestions:

YAskY - Syndicated Mad Magazine content

YRULooking@Me? - Not sure. Perhaps an anti-social networking site?

YLive - Suicide Provention Website

Yeah. The whole joke seemed funnier in my head. Sorry about that.

Posted by: Samuel Lame | August 31, 2004 05:37 AM

Thanks for the explanation. Now all those conspiracy theories can be squashed. You'd be amazed by all the theories on the internet about the name... and I thought I had too much time onmy hands!

"Because There's a Bastard In All of Us"
The Mad Dater - A Dating Blog
http://themaddater.blogspot.com

Posted by: The Mad Dater | August 31, 2004 06:49 AM

I really like the Private Idaho name it sounds sneeky like...muwhahahaha

Posted by: Ryan | August 31, 2004 07:21 AM

Conspiracy theories, you say?

You mean that everyone doesn't know that all of the product names were secretly picked by a group of Illuminati trained Sasquatch we got from some aliens back in '47. We keep them in a boat just south of Bermuda. Unfortunately the story was leaked to the Weeky World News two years ago and we lost them to a group of black helicopters sent by the U.N.

Now we use sheep Ouija.

Posted by: jr | August 31, 2004 08:32 AM

I'm not supposed to laugh in my office, JR. But thanks, much. And yes, you can call me "Mad". Thanks for the laughs... and they say those Search Cats have no sense of humor...

Posted by: The Mad Dater | August 31, 2004 09:53 AM

See, this whole time I thought you were just ripping off John Batelle's 'Searchblog' name.

I suppose imitation is the sincerest...

Posted by: SR McGough | September 2, 2004 06:16 AM

In my opinion, "blog.yahoo.com",it's easier to remember.
Once i heard yahoo launched blog, "blog.yahoo.com" would be this site I think.But why not? It redirect to "groups"?

Posted by: gzkou | September 4, 2004 05:02 PM

Jeremy was too critical of our creativity :-). We have products named Jackie and Oswald. When Oswald was obsolete and "killed", the next product was named Ruby. Isn't that creative?

Nam

Posted by: Anonymous | September 10, 2004 04:29 PM