Project Gemini

Why do programmers have so little imagination when it comes to names? It should almost never be the case that project names conflict

Ask Google, this project predates the LLM.

Too small for Google to care about.

Large tech molochs don't care about any name, it seems. Their power and weight makes the name point to them. Seek on "Amazon" and find that, oh the 7th Wonder of Nature the "Amazon rainforest" is ranked second after some random Big Tech company run by a guy named Jeff. The "lungs of the earth" vs. cheap package delivery and AWS dashboards.

I mean, yeah. What percentage of searches for "Amazon" in today's world do you think is going to not be about acquiring cheap shit very quickly? I would expect the tech company to be a better answer than most when someone searches for Amazon. Searching for "the amazon" gives the expected results as that's how it is more commonly referred. So it does seems like your search query as performed was just a bad search

I bet it would be a few percent less and the world would be a fraction of a percent better if the first result was the rainforest.

I wonder how much they pay Google for the top spot.

Amazon does not need to pay Google for this. There is no world where Google puts an organic result about the rainforest in the top spot, because it's not what most users are looking for.

At most there might be a world where Google puts someone else's ad above the organic results.