From Alphabet to Google

« previous post | next post »

Google has picked "Alphabet" as the name for its new parent company:

"‘Alphabet,’ From Ancient Greece to Google", by Ben Zimmer, in Word on the Street, Wall Street Journal (8/13/15)

I think it's a brilliant choice, and our colleague Ben has done a good job of explaining why.

[h.t. June Teufel Dreyer]



5 Comments

  1. Chips Mackinolty said,

    August 15, 2015 @ 2:48 pm

    Does this make all people who use Google search engines abecedarians?

  2. K said,

    August 15, 2015 @ 3:32 pm

    I suppose when your CEO is named Page, it's a natural choice.

  3. Jason Stokes said,

    August 16, 2015 @ 11:05 pm

    Google doesn't own Alphabet.com nor Alphabet on either Twitter or Facebook, and it (ironically) leaving aside the news hype, it fails the google test — your core site should come up soon, preferably first, on a google search for it, a fate that also plagues its software language "Go", which is virtually ungoogleable, forcing the users to use the heaps awks nym "golang" when they want their discussion of the language to be indexed. Just saying, for a search engine company, they seem to be remarkably unsophisticated about basic SEO strategy.

  4. Victor Mair said,

    August 18, 2015 @ 1:16 pm

    Google’s New Internet Domain Name Got Blocked Instantly

    Well-known Chinese news site Sina recently reported that, as soon as Google’s co-founder Larry Page announced the restructuring of the company, within 24 hours, the Chinese ‘Great Firewall” blocked the new parent company Alphabet’s internet domain name http://www.abc.xyz. China’s official news media issued widespread reports on the restructuring event and even described the new domain name as “unusual.” However the Chinese netizens won’t be able to access the new website, although it only has a letter from Larry Page and a link to its investor relationship. Google has suffered a poor relationship with the Chinese government for long time because Google refused to implement the censorship that the Chinese government required. In 2013, Google decided to leave the Chinese market citing the censorship issue and the fact that the company had been hacked. Starting in 2014, the Chinese government has been blocking Google Mail, Google Translation, and Google Maps, in addition to Google Search.
    Source: Sina, August 12, 2015
    http://finance.sina.com/bg/tech/udn/su/20150812/16271314690.html
    (Chinascope)

    This is how much China hates Google.

  5. BZ said,

    August 20, 2015 @ 2:17 pm

    Tangentially related, I was at first confused when I read about the group calling themselves "Beta Israel" (also known as Ethiopian Jews). My first thought was "why would someone call his own group secondary?" In this case Beta is a rendition of the Hebrew word "Bet" meaning "house", thus "house of Israel". What I didn't know until now is that those two words are actually related.

RSS feed for comments on this post