Andrew Gelman regretted the name “Stan”, because it is a common word, which makes it hard to find relevant results on Google. Actually I was taught the same lesson by Hadley when I first created the knitr package in 2011. Fortunately I listened. In the very beginning, I simply named it “knit”, which is certainly not very “Googleable”. Appending “R” after it made it much easier and “neater” to search through Google. In the early years, I had a couple of other packages named after common words, such as animation and fun. These packages were obviously difficult to find via Google, although on the other hand, I guess they are not really important packages, so users won’t think of finding them.
In the following years, I tried to stick to this rule of using unique words when naming packages, e.g., bookdown, blogdown, xaringan, and tinytex. There is no ambiguity for these packages in Google results now. When I started working on pagedown last year, I spent some time on searching for different names on Google, and initially decided to use the name leafdown, because it seemed to be unique enough, and “leaf” also has the meaning of “page”. The first name that came to my mind was actually pagedown, because it was such an obvious choice (an R Markdown package for paged documents). I didn’t want to use this name for the obvious reason. However, JJ suggested that I go with the name pagedown. His defense was from the experience of “Shiny”. Shiny is such a common word, yet after a couple of years, Google started to put our Shiny on the first page of search results.
Before I made pagedown public on GitHub, there was another pagedown project from StackExchange on GitHub. I though I’d never be able to compete with StackExchange in the Google search. To my great surprise, our pagedown became the first item in the Google search results within three months!
A much more extreme example is the DT package. The name is only two letters. I’d never imagine it could be found via Google. However, even with the two letters, DT has made its way to the first page of Google search results.
I guess the new lesson learned here is that a common word as a software package name is probably fine, but you’d better avoid words related to the pop culture or the entertainment industry. If you search for a word on Google and Google shows you YouTube videos or images, it is likely to be a bad idea.
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