DAFFIE to Porky Pig: Google's Weird Project Codes

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 10 January 2012, 22:30 IST
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Bangalore: Google fancies naming its internal projects with codes that sound and seem weird in all senses “Leaf”, “Foby”,  “SweatNovember” and “Old Possum” are some among the lot.

Google updates features of its search engine and had recently come up with enhancement like image and voice search and a bunch of new features tossed with the old one.

Many of the Google’s projects on search engine had mysterious internal code names. Google Tech staffer Pandu Nayak wrote in his blog, “Codenames make changes easier to talk about and remember, they can also be a lot of fun”.  The old question answering feature in Google was code named ‘DAFFIE’, a short form for “Database of All Fact Fiction Information and Exaggeration.”  When the company planned a makeover for ‘DAFFIE’, an Engineer Amit Singhal renamed the new project as ‘Porky Pig’ based on the cartoon characters Daffy Duck and its hunter Porky Pig.

“You might remember ‘Panda’ and ‘Caffeine’, but you probably don’t remember last month’s -Top result selection code rewrite”, said Nayak in his blog.

 ‘Caffeine’ was the nickname for Google’s improved search index released in 2010 and a project designed to list more relevant sites during search was called ‘Panda’.

 The previous month witnessed a few projects with weird names. The project, code named ‘Leaf’ was meant to improve the search algorithms for spam detection in image searches. ‘Foby’ added more accuracy to the dates associated with a document search while ‘SweatNovember’ was meant for improving accuracy in translating Hebrew synonyms. “Old Possum” enabled faster mobile browsing by redirecting mobile searches directly to the optimized pages.

Some of other features added to search by Google in last month include improved lyric searches, encrypted search based on regional domains and improved filter for safer searches. Let’s wait to see the cryptic internal names for the future projects and the funny reasons behind the names.