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Comment by JoeSmithson | Hacker News Reader

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JoeSmithson

This is seems to be true of apps names as well. For example, to pick a few random examples;

- Spotify's actual name on Google Play is "Spotify: Discover music, podcasts, and playlists" (so catchy!)

- SoundHound's actual name is "SoundHound - Music Discovery & Hands-Free Player"

Rather than fixing whatever search behaviour incentivised this, Google seem to have just joined in;

- Google Maps is actually called "Maps - Navigate & Explore"

- Google Keep is actually called "Google Keep - Notes and Lists"

When I got a new phone recently I actually found it really confusing and had to check I wasn't installing phishing apps by mistake.

Thankfully Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are currently named with their actual names!

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Tangentially related... the most memorable answer/blurb I've heard to the question "what do you sell?" came from a Coca-Cola executive in an interview with Charlie Rose (I forget which one, so citation needed). The exec said "we sell ready-to-drink, non-alcoholic beverages". I've never heard a marketing pitch that told me more about what a company does than that blurb, and I use that as my benchmark for whether a blurb I am crafting describes what I am trying to pitch.

I think it can be simplified even more: "we sell non-alcoholic beverages".

Especially because they own Minute Maid, and Minute Maid concentrated orange juice is still a thing.

In fact Minute Maid's very name alludes to it not being ready-to-drink.

Funny to see the Minute Maid product page https://www.minutemaid.com/products/ shows drinks that seems ready-to-drink.

The app store UIs could just differentiate between the canonical name and a short tag line. Right now tweaking the title is the only way to add a description to the search result list.

The iOS App Store tries to do this since a version or two ago.

Apps still stick a bunch of junk in their names though. Partially because there are app name squatters, and one way to get around an app name being taken is to add stuff to it. Partially due to SEO myths.

>Thankfully Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are currently named with their actual names!

I have some ideas for them:

"Twitter - Whining & Doxxing"

"Facebook - Data mining & Old People"

"YouTube - Clickbait & Drama"

On iOS, the app is named "Google Maps - Transit & Food." Food!

Fortunately the App Store name can be different from the app name once installed, which remains "Google Maps."

As mentioned, the app stores' UI could definitely help in getting rid of the dirty phishing app feeling. I do believe though that the enlongated names in this scenario is probably to help newbies to find a new app that they didn't know of. Slightly different from the enlogated book substitles scenario as the books are competing on Google's entire database of books, linkes, articles, etc. versus the apps are mostly only competing with other apps on their app stores.

Why the heck would Google itself need this kind of SEO junk?

Why not just let people search by app (and book) description text (does it really not work this way already?)?

Google needs that kind of SEO junk as much as anybody else who publishes in the play store, because somehow depsite google's general excellence at search the search function in the play store is still garbage.

Google has to be careful giving too much favoritism to their own products, because it invites regulation for abusing their monopoly.

So it's often better to just play the same SEO games for their own products that everyone else has to play.

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