All Alphabet's holdings have common names. What could go wrong?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/12/alphabets-google-search-results

Version 0 of 1.

This week, Google announced a new holding company, Alphabet, that will oversee its increasingly disparate industries. No longer will we have to wonder why a search engine company is dabbling in biomedicine or self-driving cars (if you were actually wondering that, which I wasn’t). Now, the search engine is just one of Alphabet’s many concerns.

Related: Inside Alphabet: why Google rebranded itself and what happens next

I can’t bring myself to get especially worked up about this. I can build you a nice soapbox speech about the human aspects of the tech industry, but when it comes to the actual business stuff I have the acumen of an elephant seal. Someone needs to award me an honorary... whatever the opposite of an MBA is. However, I do have one burning question about Alphabet, which is this: if it’s the next iteration of Google, why are so many of its companies named after nouns?

I’ve never been privy to a company’s naming process, but I’ve seen people try to name magazines and I’ve seen people try to name bands. In the pre-internet era, you could go with “Time” or “The The” without a second thought; the salient questions were mostly “is it memorable,” “does it sound cool” and “will it look good on band merch/softball jerseys.” These days, though, there are additional considerations: is the domain name available? OK, but is the domain name available for less than $90,000? And is it Googleable?

The easiest way to achieve Googleability is to use an uncommon or made-up word, or a creative phrase. Or you could smash two words together, or misspell them – hence the CamelCase brand names popular in the early 2000s and the Removd Vowl trend slightly later. The point is, you want your company name to refer only to your company, not to your company and also a bunch of unrelated objects. For most people, for all intents and purposes, if it can’t be found in the first two pages of Google results, it doesn’t exist.

Of course there are ways to kick yourself up the rankings, but until you dominate, a common noun name is a liability. (Plus, the commoner your noun is, the more likely other businesses have gotten to it first. Even with Google’s new venture all over the news, my search for “nest” – the smart-thermostat company now owned by Google/Alphabet – brought up as its first result The Turkey’s Nest, a Brooklyn bar specializing in giant absinthe slushies. Google knows where I am and what I like.)

Related: Why Google is restructuring, why the name Alphabet and how it affects you

Alphabet has considered none of this, by all appearances. Its company names are painfully generic. “Fiber” is going to have competing results from nutrition sites, knitting sites, and -optic cables. “Life Sciences” – don’t even get me started. All the life sciences? Really? “Calico”? That is a cat, or a dress worn by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It’s like they have a secret room with a baby in it, and they just name companies after whatever the baby points at. Or whatever noises come out of its mouth, maybe – that would explain “Google.” And “Alphabet,” now that I think of it. Perhaps as Mystery Googlebaby ages we’ll get ever-larger umbrella companies called Poop Jokes, Awkward Pick-Up Lines, and Pass the Bong.

Of course, Google is owned by Google, so when you Google Alphabet you currently get a bunch of news hits about the new corporation. (Bing results are about half Alphabet and half, you know, the alphabet; Yahoo is mostly the alphabet.) When you control the search engine, the search engine holds no power over you; if Google is in charge of whether something exists, it can just rearrange existence in its favor. Which raises the question: what’s going to happen when people want to look up, say, the life sciences? Or the alphabet? Will they be relegated to the existential void of the third results page? Please, Google/Alphabet, cool it with the noun names, before you rewrite the nature of reality.