I've been down this road before and feel burned after selecting a more generic name for a service that required some name recognition (appointment.one in this case - there was just no way to Google it).

On the other hand I have done well with a more generic name that depended on long-tail SEO (10s of millions of pages linked from something like descriptive-name-with-dashes.com).

The new venture will be long tail SEO focussed again but I also want the domain to feel less fly by night. Are people more or less likely to click with the following scenarios:

* coffee-maker-review.com vs beantalk.com (so limited keyword overlap)

* best-domain-name-generator.com vs. fleetnam.com (so no keyword overlap)

The former in each example feels more descriptive, but I also feel like clicking on it would bring up a page filled with ads and zero useful content. That said, the latter options are more easily skipped over if you were to quickly scan the search results with the old eyes glazed over.

If you don't intend the project to ever have brand recognition is it a misstep to go for inventing a new word?

What have you done successfully / unsuccessfully?