I think I made a great decision the other day when I purchased a new domain name; snag.gr. I figured it would be the perfect choice to replace the name of my poorly-titled pet project; Imaggregator.

For those of you who don't know what Imaggregator is, think of it as an image search aggregator (hence the name). Say, for instance, you're looking for a nice stock photo of a Mustang. What do you do? Well, you search for one on the web. But, where do you search? Flickr, Google, Bing, Picasa or Photobucket? In most cases, you'll end up searching multiple sites individually until you find a suitable image with the appropriate license. Not that big of a deal unless you find yourself doing this multiple times a day. Searching all these individual sites can be a serious inconvenience.

I figured people shouldn't have to search in all these places. So, with a bit of thought and research, I came up with a way to pull results from all these sites with a single search. It's much easier just typing in what you want and then have the ability to browse the results from multiple sites on one page.

So, what's the problem? The problem lies with the name of the service. In it's most basic form, Imaggregator is an image search aggregator; it pulls search results from multiple sources and aggregates them into a single page. The name makes sense, but you have to admit it's a pretty poor choice. It's too long, difficult to spell and say, not very attractive and a bit too nerdy. When I refer to the service by name, people usually give me that "what the hell were you thinking" look.

"It's a brilliant idea, but the name is fucking terrible.", is the usual verbal response. So, I set out in search of an appropriate replacement. The new name needed to be short, catchy, fun and, most importantly, inexpensive. I mean, let's face it, the project isn't making any money at the moment, so I don't really feel like dropping $1,200 USD a year (ahem, swi.pr) on a domain name. After a few hours of brain storming with mind maps, a thesaurus and the help of Doma.nr, I came up with a brilliant name: snag.gr!

It's a play on the word "snagger", as in to "snag" or "take" something. In this case, at least for the first phase of the site, it snags images from multiple sources. I think this is a perfect replacement for the service. Lucky, too, as it isn't even finished yet which means I won't have to worry about search engine indexing issues and what not.

It will take a few days for the registrar to complete the process and I'm stoked you can register Greek domain names without any registration restrictions. Got it at a very fair price from 101domain.com for $79 USD for 2 years, too, so I can't complain. Personally, I think it's a great investment as I plan on spending quite a bit of time on this service. It's a great idea and I believe people will find it to be useful.

I also went ahead and threw together a little logo for the site. I wanted to keep it simple and I think I pulled it off. Maybe later on down the road I will hire a real designer to give it, and the rest of the site, some flair. I guess we'll see what happens!

Comments and critique are always welcome!

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