Where's Mamma, Norman Bates?

I hope you had a respectable Father's Day yesterday. Now it's Mamma's turn. The company behind the "mother of all search engines" is going in for a makeover. Mamma.com (Nasdaq: MAMA) is ditching its maternal moniker and going with Copernic.

Even if the dispensing of Mamma is a Norman Bates move, the company hasn't gone Psycho. The move makes sense. The stock took off back in October after Copernic's desktop search software was incorporated into Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) OpenRide software platform for AOL.

Sure, Mamma.com is still a major part of the company, but no one will ever confuse a fringe metasearch specialist with the more popular search stars like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), MSN, and IAC/InterActiveCorp's (Nasdaq: IACI) Ask.com.

Copernic won't be the first obscure paid search star to try to change its luck by adopting the name of a more tech-driven subsidiary. FindWhat.com hoped to shed its checkered past by changing its name to MIVA (Nasdaq: MIVA) a couple of years ago.

Hopefully the freshly renamed company will continue to post top-line improvements as it narrows its operating deficits. Changing its name won't get in the way of that. It may actually help, if more companies approach the company the way Time Warner did last year. Despite silly industry names like Yahoo!, Mamma.com was always a tough one to take seriously.

So farewell, Mamma.com, as you head off into the dot-com graveyard. Here's hoping that you "FindWhat" you're looking for.

Time Warner and Yahoo! are Motley Fool Stock Advisor newsletter selections.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz loves his mamma. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early. The Fool has a disclosure policy.