Why Google Gives Its Search Projects Weird Names

Google made more than two dozen improvements to its bedrock search feature in December, and the projects had cryptic internal names — including “Old Possum,” “SweatNovember” and “Pho Viet.”

Why the funky nomenclature?

“Code names make changes easier to talk about and remember, and they can also be a lot of fun,” Google tech staffer Pandu Nayak writes in a blog post. “You might remember ‘Panda’ and ‘Caffeine,’ but you probably don’t remember last month’s ‘Top result selection code rewrite.’”

Nayak recounts one example of the naming process, from a 2010 revamping of Google Search’s question-answering feature. The previous incarnation was codenamed “DAFFIE,” an acronym for the tongue-twisting and mind-boggling title “Database of All Fact Fiction Information and Exaggeration.” When the company planned a complete makeover of the feature in 2010, engineer Amit Singhal riffed on the original codename’s similarity to the cartoon character Daffy Duck.

Singhal dubbed the new system “Porky Pig,” likening the new answering feature’s quest to kill off the old one to Porky Pig’s efforts to eliminate Daffy Duck.

“The team laughed thinking that Amit was just confused (everyone knows Elmer Fudd is the hunter),” Nayak writes. “But, it turns out Amit was right, as he often is. In 1937 in the original cartoon to feature Daffy Duck, Porky Pig was in fact hunting Daffy.”

In December, “Old Possum” enabled faster mobile browsing by skipping redirects to take users straight to pages optimized for smartphone browsers. “Pho Viet” introduced more accurate spelling predictions for search queries in Vietnamese, and “SweatNovember” improved accuracy in translating Hebrew synonyms.

Here are some of the other improvements Google says it made made to its search feature last month: adding live results for NFL and college football information; tweaking the +1 to only show up when search results are hovered over or have already been recommended; better spam detection for image results; more accurate country-specific results; and improved lyric searches. To see the full list, click here.

What Google Search improvements would you most like to see? Where do you think “Old Possum,” “Pho Viet” and “SweatNovember” got their codenames? Let us know in the comments.