Help! I need a name!

Friday, May 19, 2006 by DeWitt Clinton

Who is feeling creative today?

I need a name for a new site. The name needs to be available on .com, .net, and .org and not trademarked or in common use.

The site is going to host a blog, a wiki, and a mailing list for search technology information.

I've been incredibly frustrated by the lack of solid public information on real search technology. If you do a search for anything "search" related on Google or Yahoo or MSN all you come up with is thousands of hits from the f*cking SEO "community." So I want to start a public repository of articles and notes for the people that actually build search technology. We need to band together and share our knowledge.

A question I hear very frequently is "what books should I read on search technologies?" I even asked the same question at work and on Unto.net last year. While everyone recommends Managing Gigabytes, the real truth of the matter is that there isn't that much out there beyond the academic papers and scattered transcripts and slides of lectures.

Thus I am going to start a site that lets us compile a encyclopedic knowledgebase on search technology. I'd like for the articles to be technical and relatively practical, along the lines of "Building A Vector Space Index" or "TFIDF Relevancy" or "Search Query Parsing" or "Search Term Stemming" or "Spam Query Detection" or "Stopping SEO Abuse" or "Real Time Index Merging". The articles should range from covering the basics to the exploring the esoteric. Code snippets are strongly encouraged. Citations are mandatory. Let's work together to make this a site for all of the people that work with search.

What do we call it? I first thought of "SearchTech" but that was taken. Please help me think of a name. IM me at 'untonet' on AIM or email me at 'dewitt [at] unto [dot] net' or leave a comment below if you can think of anything.