Spickr: another unfortunate name, this time it's a startpage

"Flickr" is a great name for a photo-sharing site. Displays flicker sometimes, right? Maybe you flick through your photo album? Recently, we've reviewed a couple of neat services with "add an r to the end"-style names that didn't quite work as smoothly: DeskLickr and Dumpr. Not exactly the kinds of names you want to tell a friend about.

Continuing our ongoing coverage of interesting, useful websites with extremely unfortunate names, let's try this one on for size. Your friend sees your fancy-looking startpage and asks, "What's that cool site?" "Oh," you casually respond, "that's Spickr!" SPICKR? Did someone really name a slick, search-based startpage after an old-fashioned, patently-offensive racial slur? It turns out that, no, no they did not. The official explanation is that the name means you can "PICK" the information you want, and the "S" is for "search."

If you can get past the name, Spickr is a decent startpage. It does 1-click searches on Google, YouTube or Wikipedia, has a nice list of popular sites in the sidebar, and the ability to navigate your del.icio.us from within its interface. The site is clearly targeting iGoogle users, with a bare-bones "no widgets, no RSS" message - if that appeals to you, give it a look. Maybe send them an email, while you're at it, and suggest they come up with a better name for their product.

UPDATE: The folks at Spickr noticed this post, and the service is now called FastEagle. We've updated the URLs for this post appropriately.

Tags: Spickr, start page, StartPage, unfortunate