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Yeah, I'm one of the developers at www.openbay.com (I'm not Adam, I'm one of the other web developers). We've spent a couple years trying to get our startup of

Yeah, I'm one of the developers at www.openbay.com (I'm not Adam, I'm one of the other web developers). We've spent a couple years trying to get our startup off the ground, and this really sucks for us. And I'm a fan of TPB - I've used it, and I admire their work. This isn't a case of some big corporation trying to exercise it's legal muscle to ward off bad PR, we're a few people running out of a co-working space in Cambridge. Armchair lawyers will likely chime in how this isn't a "real" name clash and how they're different things in different lines of work (and they'd be right), but the thing that really sucks for us is SEO. Many users (especially older ones) have gotten in the habit of just typing "openbay" or "open bay" into google and not the URL bar - it's actually a pretty large percentage of our organic search hits. This happens even more if/when they hear about us in the press. What those users get for search results right now are a bunch of news sites about "piracy," which isn't a great thing, particularly for that demographic. It'd be so awesome of the project could be renamed out of the kindness of the maintainers' hearts, but I know that's not likely. The cat's already out of the bag now. But we figured it wouldn't hurt to ask nicely.

butwhy 12y ago
Well there are already a whole bunch of articles referencing openbay and they will remain in the search results. Not really anything you can do about it.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  After some reasonable amount of time they'll drop off the front page of Google, though - Google prefers new information to older information, in general.
  - butwhy 12y ago
    Very generalised comment and not necessarily true (many factors come into it). But that implies that this company is going to generate enough of its own publicity to push out stories already ranking from techcrunch and arstechnica etc.
pain 12y ago
Is it possible search engine algorithms might at least sort results well enough that users can see the name clash for itself, and if people notice the news it maybe give a small boost that your name was good enough to be reformulated.

butwhy 12y ago

Well there are already a whole bunch of articles referencing openbay and they will remain in the search results. Not really anything you can do about it.

vertex-four 12y ago
After some reasonable amount of time they'll drop off the front page of Google, though - Google prefers new information to older information, in general.
- butwhy 12y ago
  Very generalised comment and not necessarily true (many factors come into it). But that implies that this company is going to generate enough of its own publicity to push out stories already ranking from techcrunch and arstechnica etc.

pain 12y ago

Is it possible search engine algorithms might at least sort results well enough that users can see the name clash for itself, and if people notice the news it maybe give a small boost that your name was good enough to be reformulated.