The worst are when they pick a generic English word for a project that has nothing to do with that word. I'm not going to name and shame, but there are so many examples of new project that get posted to HN monthly that have irrelevant and unsearchable names. We see things like "Show HN: Banana - A lightweight URL parsing library in Rust". WTF does URL parsing have to do with bananas? How do you expect that word to be uniquely searchable back to your project??
It is one of the most common words in the English language. It is also one of the most popular board games in the world, and it has nothing to do with it. It can mean plenty of other things, just look at the Wikipedia disambiguation page. It is enough of a problem that it is often called "golang" to make it more searchable.
And ironically, it is made by Google.
C is pretty terrible too, being a popular and extremely influential language with a one-letter name.
"Adoption of our Ogg Vorbis format isn't where we hoped it to be"
"Fork me on Git"
Yes, really:
https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/git.wiki.kernel.org/index...
It can go too far the other direction too, for example the generic names like Files, Phone, etc either preloaded on the device by the manufacturer (eg Samsung) or by Google, or some third party.
But i totally get your point.
I'm wondering that if some random gibberish might even be better to name a project nowadays. At least there would be less SEO collision.
