How Google create their Product or Algorithm names ?

What’s in a name? Apple names its operating systems after big cats. When Google gets around to naming products and updates, what’s their naming strategy? 

You may already know that Google’s creators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin named their baby “Google” by adapting the word googol – the number one followed by one hundred zeros. This encapsulates the scope of Google’s mission: To provide large quantities of information and make it universally accessible and useful.

But why Chrome, Panda? We’ve done research and looked at the most notable and peculiar names that Google has given their algorithm updates over the years (and a couple of others we were curious about) to see if we could hack the mind of the world’s biggest search engine.

Here’s why Google named it…

2002: Boston

It all started with a dance. If you were in SEO at the time, you’ll remember those flux periods when Google performed major maintenance/index updates, coined the Google Dance. These updates would majorly shake up the search engine results page (SERP) for 3-5 days and occurred approximately 10 times per year. Fast-forward to today, updates occur between 500-600 times a year!

In any case, “Boston” was the first documented update and was announced at SES Boston. The name was given by Webmaster World (WMW) members.

2003: Cassandra, Dominic, Esmeralda, Fritz

These series of updates were actually aimed at combating shoddy back links, hidden text and hidden links. With the goal of delivering fresher, better results for users, Google set out to execute these new updates on a monthly basis.

Cassandra, Dominic, Esmeralda, Fritz were also named by the folks over at WMW.The members decided that they wanted to name the updates similarly to how hurricane names are selected: in alphabetical order, one month male, one month female. Since the previous month’s update was Boston, they went with a female name and voted on Cassandra because “we just liked it.” See below why Brett Tabke, founder and owner of WMW and the PubCon conference, finalized the name.

“Dominic” was actually named after a pizza place in Boston that was frequented by PubCon attendees. “Esmeralda and Fritz” marked the end of the monthly "Google Dance” and the beginning of Everflux. The index was now being updated daily.

2003: Florida

 

There were several theories floating regarding the origins of the name “Florida” for this 2003 update. Some speculated the name came from the series of hurricanes that hit Florida.

In many ways, the Florida update was like a hurricane, scooping up low-value SEO tactics into its raging cyclone. However, like Boston, Tabke called it Florida because there was an upcoming WMW conference in Orlando.

Florida was by far the most noticeable and significant update at the time. It was the hardest crack down on unethical SEO tactics, spam sites, and fishy backlinks. It also negatively affected many small businesses website rankings.

2005 – 2006: Big Daddy

Big Daddy had Big repercussions on notorious link exchangers, link buyers and sellers. Big D was a new data center with major software upgrades implemented that affected how the algorithm crawled and indexed sites. Site pages containing suspicious links were no longer getting indexed in the new data center.

The name for the update actually came a year after it was first rolled out. It was GoogleGuy, Matt Cutts’ first chance to christen an update name.

Why Big Daddy? As Cutts recounts in a blog post, he and some members at PubCon 2006 were sitting around the lunch room after a Q&A session. Cutts took the opportunity to get some feedback about what the new data center name should be. One of the webmasters suggested “Big Daddy” because that’s what his kids called him. Cutts approved. Big Daddy was dubbed.

2010: Caffeine 

 

In 2009, a preview of Caffeine was released. The goal was to drastically change the search indexing infrastructure. With the official launch in 2010, Google called it “whole new web indexing system” generating 50 percent fresher results than their previous index. “Caffeine” gave the search engine a major jolt (hence the name Caffeine) increasing the speed of crawling pages, speeding up how fast the search engine delivered results, the accuracy of results in relation to the search term

 

 

2011: Panda/Farmer

 

This update seemed to directly target content farms. According to Google, this update affected up to 12 percent of search results. The update penalized low quality sites, low quality content/duplicate content; generally content deemed not valuable to the user.

 Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts revealed that they used the code name ”Panda” to refer to the update internally. Like Vince, Panda was named after one of the key Google engineers who worked on the update and made it possible, Navneet Panda.

   

Google Chrome

According to the Design Lead at Google Chrome, Glen Murphy, the name “Chrome” was established initially as a codename for the project by one of the project leads. Presumably, he liked fast cars, speed and shiny engines.

From a design perspective, the name was particularly fitting as 'chrome' refers to the non-webpage parts of the browser's interface (toolbars, tabs and buttons).

Murphy says, "because our design philosophy was 'Content, not chrome' - putting our focus on minimizing the amount of browser UI present, we felt it cheekily appropriate to name the browser 'Chrome'."

What’s In A Name?

Google algorithms will always be something of a mystery, but their naming strategy isn’t! In fact they abide by the principles of any good product naming system:

• Make it simple
• Make it easy to remember
• Make it short
• Give it personality