Sneha Barhate

One unmarked card tag lying parallel to the lens on a bare tabletop beneath a single amber lamp low on the left, its edges catching the light and its fibre showing, one soft shadow reaching out rightward, the rest of the tabletop sinking to black

Sneha keeps the register — the table putting each JaiHo name beside the thing it opens — and she is the reason the right-hand column of it says not established four times instead of guessing four times.

JaiHo 777

The names beat

The register is hers, and so are the entries for the individual names: rummy, slots and the Yono pairing. The home page is hers too.

Her rule is short enough to fit on a card, and she applies it to her own drafts before anyone else's: a name is not a product until something outside the name says so.

It sounds obvious. It is not what the pages ranking for these searches do. Thousands of people search a name; a page appears titled after that name; the page describes a product. Nobody along that chain ever established that a product exists, and by the time it reaches a reader it has the confident shape of something that does.

JaiHo 777

The finding she keeps returning to

Of the fourteen rows in the register, four are not products at all — they are a misspelling, a publisher's account name, an in-app counter and a word from a file name. Two of those four are typed more often than several of the real products.

Her point about that is not that people are careless. It is that four different things on an app page can be mistaken for a product name, and nothing on the page distinguishes them. The store puts the title, the publisher, the category and the currency wording on one card in the same typeface, and expects a reader to know which is which.

Checked by Sneha Barhate · Names and what they resolve to