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DAVID KIPEN reporting: As the search engine Google prepares for its initial public offering, some skeptics gripe that the company's recent SEC filing leaves out key information like, for example, how it actually works. This is, of course, patently absurd. You want to know how Google works? Easy. Tell a friend about two search engines that you find useful. Call one Google, the other Lycos. Later that night, your friend sits down at his computer and wants to look something up. He has two options. He can Google it, which is fun to say and which reminds him of the enormous number googol, or the delicious word ogle, or if he's old enough! he novelty song "Barney Google (with the Goo-Goo-Googley Eyes)." Or he can use--what was that other search engine again?

You see, that's how Google works. All its technological advantages wouldn't matter a farthing without the power of a good, chewy name. Such is the general idea behind an informative, overdue, only slightly irksome new non-fiction book by Alex Frankel called "Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business."

Frankel's a Bay area business journalist who's published articles about company-naming for Wired and The New York Times Magazine. And he's an erstwhile corporate namer himself. In "Wordcraft" he offers readers a peek under the tent at how such recent brands as the BlackBerry, Accenture, the Porsche Cayenne, IBM's e-business and Viagra all came to be. Plus, he does all this without any recourse to the "Romeo & Juliet" line 'What's in a name?' for which he surely deserves some kind of medal.

The only problem with the book is that for my taste at least Frankel comes off a tad uncritical of all the infallible marketing geniuses he interviews. Too often he'll describe some dumb name like Accenture as `an interesting choice, a forward-thinking move to seize the high ground,' a sure sign that somebody's been spending too much time in boardrooms, breathing in Magic Marker fumes. Frankel pays lip service to anti-corporate sentiments, but he also reminisces wistfully about the experience of trying to rename a crooked hospital chain.

Would it have killed him to include at least one case study about some endlessly brainstormed, exhaustively researched new product name that still went laughably wrong? And Frankel rarely pauses to ask if an economy where companies can drop $100 million on a branding campaign while helping to fight minimum wage increases and ship jobs overseas--if such an economy can really be as forward-thinking as it thinks.

Nevertheless, Frankel has hold of an interesting subject in "Wordcraft," and when the juicy anecdotes start flying, it's hard to begrudge him his occasional swigs of BlackBerry Kool-Aid. For instance, did you know that the consulting firm that coined Viagra is itself named--I swear--Wood Worldwide? Sometimes, as Frankel's occasionally puffy but regularly fascinating book proves, there's such a thing as the perfect name.

BRAND: David Kipen is the book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.