Ruder Finn is one of the world's largest public relations agencies. It is not an angry Nordic person or a ship's stearing device.

Nevertheless, the term Ruder Finn is fairly "googleable." It's not easily confused with other results, even if you don't know how to spell it (Rudder Finn and Ruder Fin are common mistakes).

Left Brain's authors, I must say, are extremely googleable. There no mistaking which Darius Razgaitis or Yan Shikhvarger you're reading about when you search those names. Mine nets a little over 1,500 results and Yan gets 201.

But other names are not as fortunate for gaining high prominence in web searches. My wife, for example, used to have a name that would return over 1.5 million results that would include anyone from the president of the American Ahteists to the president of Liberia. This can get so bad that a name change is in order, as became the case when my wife married me, and what the French town of Eu is considering.

For companies, this can also be a challenge. Anyone who has had to do a Factiva search for companies like Shell, Apple, and Southwest know what I mean (and they probably also know how to use the fancy Factiva search codes).

Going beyond company name, this should be an important consideration for businesses looking to name their awareness campaigns, new products, and even executive titles (e.g. Chief Creative Officer).

A Malthusian might tell you that this will become more challenging as time goes on, given the finite number of possible combinations. There was even a play once and a book based on Googlewhacking -- the art of producing one search result using two words without quotes.

While I doubt we'll ever run out of names for stuff, I do think things will become increasingly difficult to maintain googleable.

What do you think? Have you ever had to come up with a Googleable name?