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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Because it describes what a stack overflow is, rather than being a site named after the thing?

That would be my thinking. Ok so maybe wikipedia doesn't have to be the top result, but I'd rather have results relating to the thing I'm searching for come above sites just named after it.

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I am willing to bet the City of London against a house-brick that the vast majority of people searching for 'ford' are not looking for a definition of the river crossing, but rather the motor vehicle company named after the man named after several other generations of men named after such a river crossing.

There's a qualitative difference somewhere there. I'd still prefer the river crossing to come top, but recognise that's just me.

In both of these cases you can get google to do what you prefer by typing "define" in front.

"define ford" shows a dictionary definition of ford before all results, "define stack overflow" shows a link to wikipedia before all results.

Not really, as all the results are then about the definition. Definitions, then popular sites, then whatever else, IMHO, would be quite useful.

Of course with the imprecise and constantly moving nature of language this is not easy.

Maybe people are actually searching for the site, and not the thing that named it?

Oh maybe, and maybe they search for that more often than they search for the thing it's named after, and maybe more people would find it more useful that way.

I'm really just expressing a preference :)

You'll notice that people search for facebook not "face book" when they go there.

Stack Overflow is officially named "Stack Overflow" (with the space)[1], though it's common to refer to it as stackoverflow (no space), of course.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/about

Their logo has no space, nor does their web address. People typing in "stack overflow" I bet are not looking for the web site. I'm sure google analytics for stackoverflow.com could tell us if it was true.

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