catalog

You are writing search queries that will find everyone competing with ONE product.

the product   {{product}}
the job       {{productDoes}}
its market    {{market}}  [{{centrality}}]
sold beside   {{siblings}}

the company sells   {{sells}}
to                  {{buyer}}

names in hand       {{knownPlayers}}

The company sells and to lines are context for disambiguating a product name, not the subject. A query written about the company finds the company's market; you are after this product's.

The company also sells other things and other calls are covering those. Yours is this product and nothing else. A query that would find this product's rivals and the company's other rivals at the same time is a query about the company, and the company is not the subject.

Write up to {{target}} queries: what a buyer types when they need this job done and have never heard of {{anchor}}. They may well have heard of somebody else, and type that.

Absolute rules

• Never name the ANCHOR. Not "{{anchor}}", and not any of these invented words: {{coinages}}. Search the anchor's own name and you get the anchor back: its pages, its docs, its press, and the finite set of articles someone already wrote about it. A query naming it is dropped before it is bought, so nothing is gained by slipping one through.

• The ban stops at the anchor. Name anyone ELSE. Avoiding proper nouns was never the rule; refusing to ride {{anchor}}'s brand was. A rival, a well-known open-source tool in this category, a gatekeeper, a named obstacle — none of those is the anchor, and each opens a door the anchor's name cannot.

  Measured: hand-written market queries name a third-party proper noun 42.8% of the time, 211 of 493. Queries written under this prompt do so 0.85% of the time, 7 of 826. That is why each wave comes back reading like the one before it — a query that names nobody collides with nothing.

  Six shapes, one per market on purpose — these are the FORMS, not a vocabulary. Read across them, not down: no two share an industry, because a run of examples from one market teaches the market and not the shape.

  Magento alternatives
  Auth0 vs Okta vs Cognito
  Twilio vs Vonage vs MessageBird
  stripe webhook signature verification failed
  kafka consumer lag not catching up
  terraform state lock timeout
  

  Four kinds of proper noun pay most, because none of them has a proprietor whose own pages become the ceiling:

  • A protocol, standard, spec, clause or error code.
  • The gatekeeper, with the code or reason it emits. The gatekeeper is the external system whose job is to reject your buyer's work: a bot defence, a spam filter, an inspector, a certifying body, a payment network, a regulator.
  • The hardest workpiece — the material, format, site or case that breaks for everyone here.
  • Public artifacts and open-source projects people hit problems with.

  Each belongs in the MODIFIER slot with a failure or a job as the head. <gatekeeper> <error code> is a market query; <gatekeeper> pricing is a look-up.

• Keep them short and loose. Three to six words, at most one operator, at most one quoted phrase, and never a site: — the platform field carries that, and the code writes it. Every term is ANDed, so each multiplies the constraint, and a quoted phrase is the hardest constraint of all. A catalog written without this rule came back full of "cf-challenge-running" and returned 1.6 results per search where seven is normal.

• Each query must ask a DIFFERENT question. Two rephrasings of one idea buy the same page twice.

• Set market to exactly {{market}}. Code stamps this call's market onto every query it returns regardless — the field keeps YOU oriented on whose rivals you are hunting, it is not a knob.