Might be a nice step towards rebranding for a bigger audience? I use DDG as a default search engine, but the name doesn't roll off the tongue nicely at all...
Edit: It doesn't roll of my fingers either, I didn't even type out the full name...
I love DuckDuckGo and use it on all my devices, but, WOW what a horrible name/branding. What were they thinking?
Every time I mention/recommend it to someone the response is always a blank stare followed by something along the lines of “I would never use that if only to avoid that horrible name / brand URL”. And I can’t say I blame them.
I feel like anyone who grew up in a region where duck, duck goose was a common game for children to play wouldn't be too confused about the name.
Not that being confused about the name or disliking it is a bad thing. But I like the name, and it's part of the reason I chose to start using DDG.
If they changed it to something more generic, I'd be less likely to keep using it because I'd feel less of a connection to the brand. If I'm going to use something that generic and corporate, then Binging sounds more fun than Ducking.
I do realize that potentially losing me as a user doesn't mean this would be a bad move for DDG overall.
Right, that's why I think familiarity with the game might be geographic - it seems like one of those games that's played in some places, but not others.
Or it could also be the case that the same game is played, but with a different name. Tracing the etymology of the name would be pretty interesting. As you mentioned, the game of duck duck goose is unheard of in many places that have plenty of ducks and geese.
I'm not a native English speaker and "duck duck go" doesn't evoke anything at all to me. I learned the reference from your comment even though I've been using DDG for years.
If they want to expand to non-English speaking countries having a long and somewhat complicated name like "duckduckgo" seems like a liability.
I played the game as a child, and so the reference wasn’t lost on me the first time I encountered DuckDuckGo – yet I recall my first reaction being “wow, what a clumsy, awkward name.”
It’s cute, but it’s antithetical to the idea of becoming a household word.
Oh, I'm fully familiar with the game it's referring to. I just don't understand the connection between a serious search engine and a silly child's game.
Is it some kind of inside joke? I just don't get it. I have nothing against the child's game; it just makes no sense to anyone that they named it after that, and it's not an easy name to pronounce or type. Bottom line: It sounds, feels, and looks bad on them.
Those are all ridiculous names if you want to scale them by seriousness.
Then you have MSN Search, AOL / NetFind, InfoSeek, GoTo, LookSmart, WebCrawler, alltheweb. Slightly less ridiculous sounding, which ultimately that didn't make any difference.
I agree. I don't like super generic names like "Signal" or "Go" because they're often ambiguous but some people really go too far the other way. An other example that comes to mind is "SpiderOak". I don't know if there's a reference I'm missing here but it's just a weird and obscure name for an online backup tool.
According to the founder’s AMA, they weren’t thinking.
He had acquired the name Duck Duck Go before deciding to create a search engine. So when he started he just used that name for his next project and it stayed.
It’s clearly due for some rebranding. Duck alone works great for that. It’s got some relavance to their current name, it’s short, there will never be a shortage of puns and word play.
I always figured it was simple because of the Duck Duck Goose correlation. It certainly stands out. And I do like it because of the Duck Duck Good implication. I think fitting those 3 criteria is personal taste.
Agree, this name is terrible and I think that it seriously damages whole search engine/company and lowers it's popularity.
This name gives impression that it's something made for fun and one shouldn't expect serious results out of it. Moreover I think that it actively prevents popularization - you mentioned that after your recommendation response is blank stare etc. - for me and I suppose that for many others it works differently: I don't event recommend it to anyone because I know/predicted result similar to yours.
How? I'm at work (so tracking me personally by IP is probably hard since there's hundreds of different people using the same IP) and using an incognito window. Using a different browser (that I used once or twice), incognito again, gives me the same result.
DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified.
https://duckduckgo.com/
The Internet privacy company that empowers you to
seamlessly take control of your personal information
online, without any tradeoffs.
Since Google results almost always vary by geographic location, according to the bottom of the page, Google thinks I'm in "Bernalillo County, New Mexico."
I have no idea where that is. I haven't been to New Mexico in close to 20 years. I'm currently almost 1,000 miles away from New Mexico.
When I ask Google for "duck", duckduckgo is literally the first hit. My experience may be biased, because I am from Germany, but outside of English speaking countries, they should do just fine.
It was sarcastic, the audience of DDG does not need a search engine to find a search engine. In case of WoM, it's easier to hint a friend to go to duck.com
Duck doesn't mean very much in Germany, so there's little that competes with duck.com. In Britain duck has many other meanings.
If you search for an abbreviation that's commonly used as company name, you may find that Google's top result is the one near you, and that the eponymous company in Petrapavlovsk isn't listed.
Strangely, searching from the UK it doesn't seem to be in my results at all. I'm through to the 4th page, and I've come across an article with the same story as the OP, but still not the actual site...
Edit: found it near the end of page 6! Alongside "Duck Donuts" and "London Duck Tours".
Just to be sure, I just asked bing.com for "duck". I never, ever, EVER use bing, so unless they get their search results from someone else, they should be relatively unbiased.
Once more, duckduckgo.com comes up as the first result. Once more, from _Germany_. "duck" is a German word (imperative, as in "duck and cover"), but it is really rare, so I would not be surprised if the search results were biased in favor of our new fowl overlords. But I don't think it's all filter bubble, either.
It wouldn't take very long for that to change at all. People don't really search "duck" much, so it seems reasonable that duckduckgo would quickly climb to #1 for searching "duck".
And it's already #1 for me (but that's likely because I've used the site before, and Google knows that)
I'm guessing that's it's more like a PR move to show that they're "playing fair" that doesn't cost them much. Or alternatively, a way to avoid bad PR from squatting a domain that would be beneficial to a competitor.
DuckDuckGo's main selling point [0] is the fact that it doesn't track and collect ad-targetable data on users unlike Google. The hypothetical acquisition is therefore nonsensical.
In Europe, Google's search business' market share is above the threshold at which a concentration would automatically require antitrust approval - which it has, of course, no chance of obtaining.
DDG is great - have been using it for months and I really enjoy the results. Google searches seem to be more of an echo chamber whereas DDG results seem to be more representative across a broad spectrum of sites.
From time to time I'm trying to switch to DDG. However I found its utility very limited by the fact that they don't show time-stamp for search results and there is no "Past Year" time filter.
To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. They can infer a lot from context, like city or previous searches, however that's primarily helping users, because coming up with precise search queries is not something that normal people can do and even power users like us fail at it.
I have been using DuckDuckGo because I'm making health related queries and I'm pretty scared of companies profiling me based on that.
But the experience with DDG has been worse, although it is definitely improving. And it's bearable, plus protecting my privacy is worth it.
I agree that it might not be as bad outside the US, as in the US they have more data to analyze and I'm in the EU, being more interested in news related to the EU.
But if we exclude location as a factor, it's not much of an argument because I have the benefit of constantly using both Google and DuckDuckGo, where DDG is now the primary search engine and Google is the fallback.
If Google personalizes the results in a way as to bias the information based on my political views or whatever, that's not something I have noticed. And believe me, I'd like more ammo when I criticize Google, but this ain't it in my experience.
If you're not a native english speaker working in tech, google will sometime show you (in my case) French forums or websites even if the query was entirely written in english. It is quite annoying, and i often get better results using ddg and !g than using google itself.
I'm Romanian and when searching in Romanian on DuckDuckGo I often get results in English, Spanish, Italian or French, because Romanian is a romance language.
When I'm in Japan, Google seems to try hard to give me results localized to Japan.
When I'm in the United States and need to get information about something in Japan, it can't cope with the fact that I'm not in Japan. Where Google thinks I am (even with location tracking turned off) is paramount. Even if I search google.co.jp, I get American results.
I felt like Google only worked well for things I'd done extensive searches on in the past. Like once they collected enough data on me to know WHAT I wanted to know about that topic the search results were better. Otherwise they were not very good.
DDG feels like it gives me the same search results every time. Typically they are more helpful than google would have been early on but less helpful than googles were later on.
This is entirely anecdotal... Anyone else experience something similar?
> To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google.
It's extremely obvious/bad when you try Googling some old article about an topic, often political, that has recently regained popularity.
You can try adding all kinds of words from the headline, certain terms will always lead to the results being dominated with "current news", like with Russia/Ukraine or more recently with China.
Which is made worse by the inability to specify a time-frame for the search. In that regard, the best Google can do is narrow it down to "last changed" with the extended search, which only goes as far back as "last year", anything further back than that and you might as well have to find the needle by manually looking trough the haystack of pages upon pages of search results.
It can be extremely frustrating how search results are seemingly dominated by the very same, handful, of articles offering only the very same takes, with only slight variations. It feels quite similar to how YouTube keeps recommending the same kind of weird videos to a large amount of people, like you are being "funneled".
I remember it being there, but for whatever reason, I was always looking for it under "extended search". Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
Unfortunately on mobile you can only use the date ranges that Google suggests (last hour, day, week, month, or year). Which is unfortunate since half the time I want to filter by date it's so I can exclude recent results.
The simple example here being how Google seems to prioritize "current news", particularly those clicked the most often, over actual search results.
Which from the outside feels very similar to how YouTube tends to "harmonize" it's dynamic playlists aka "mixes" to such a point that all of them end up being the same after the first 1-2 songs because everything after that seems to be strictly based on personalization and not the original song the mix was created on.
> Prioritizing current news might be annoying, but it can't be a filter bubble
Never said a thing about filter bubbles, but in a way, it feels like a self-reinforcing loop:
0 An article gets clicked often
1 Google ranks it higher in the results based on those higher click counts
2 It gets clicked even more often due to being ranked higher in the results
3 goto 0
Behavior like that might be fine when one is looking for something obscure technical to surface more relevant results.
But when it's applied to news articles it creates the impression of a bias/funnel as the top results will regularly consist of the same, slightly altered, headlines and conclusions. Which in part is probably the result of a lot of news-outlets just copy&pasting AP releases.
Note: I'm not saying this is done on purpose, it might very well just be a manifestation of the increased use of AI/ML where the end results often can't be properly explained/reasoned as the ML has become sort of a blackbox optimizing towards a given goal, like giving results that are more likely to be clicked.
I've been using it as my primary search engine for about 2 years now. I only use google now when I want to look up places because I don't like that ddg uses yelp.
I never felt google searches were bad, nor do I have problems with the results from ddg. This was just a privacy decision I guess, one that is easy to make with little sacrifice.
I always made sure to log out of Google to avoid this issue, however after a couple of years using the Duck the main thing I notice when I end up on Google is how cluttered the search results have become. You have a bunch of widgets everywhere trying to give you "smart" results, related searches etc...
Usually when I search for something I don't care about any of that, I just want to see the organic matches, not "People also ask" and "People also search for" widgets that are of no value to me.
DDG only has the wikipedia widget (which I actually find pretty useful generally) and sometimes the video or image carousel at the top which is sometimes relevant and doesn't waste a lot of screen real estate. I hope it'll continue that way.
WRT the cluttered results, at this point I pretty much refuse to use Google search on mobile because it's so often that the results are presented on the most useless, cluttered web page I've seen from any major internet company. Abysmal, really. It's especially bad if searching for a product or movie or anything else that can be bought/sold.
more representative in a broader sense - and also really good for specific searches.
they really have been upping their game and continue to do so. the other day, I was looking for a specific paper, not so old, from 2012. admittedly, for papers, I still use Google, I guess because of the link to G scholar.
I couldn't find it within about 5mins and switched to DDG. it was on p.1 of DDG. that was really great to see.
Yeah, I'd made two serious attempts at switching over the last few years, and only this last time have I stuck with it. Almost a year now on my phone and laptop. I still use Google on my work computer but might eventually switch that one too.
The main things I find myself still using the !g code for is news and maps. But for other searches I finally find I get just as good results.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results.
What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results.
So, the DuckDuckBot that you cited doesn't contribute to DDG's organic results?
90% of what Google returns to me is Wikipedia, IMDB, and other verticals anyway, so it's not that much different IME.
> So, the DuckDuckBot that you cited doesn't contribute to DDG's organic results?
Correct.
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
I wouldn't say it's better than Google - it's a bit worse for non-English queries, and similar for English ones.
Both have in common that if they don't know the answer to your query, they assume they know better than you and give you unrelated results. I'd prefer if they'd just print "Can't find anything" and let me tweak my query instead of sending back random results.
It's difficult in general to know that the results you're returning are definitely not what the user wants. You're not seeing them think that they know better than you, you're seeing lower confidence results.
Perhaps search engines could just not show you lower confidence results, but then you risk making it impossible to find certains kinds of content, and you forgo the rarer, but still extant wins, you get from showing those results.
Users can generally tell when results aren't relevant and will reformulate anyway.
Of course they have other stuff, but their web search results come directly from Yahoo/Bing and the Russian search engine Yandex. This is widely known [1]. On their FAQ though [2], they mention Yahoo and Bing, but "forget" to mention Yandex.
plus they really sell themelves as the all gloriuos knight, savior of people from evils of big bad wolf. Fine, but who is actually under the shiny helmet? Answer is not that glorious. The knight is just a puppet.
DDG works good with siple search phrases. Once you can't really formulate something like 'db2 error -418' or 'apple pie recipe' and have to go with 'something is not really working with this and that in some certain case' - DDG is useless compared to Google in my experience.
Is it really a competitor? IMO from the point of Google's view DuckDuckGo is a very small niche service that doesn't really endanger them and they can win a few bonus points with their community.
also some people use bangs [0] like !g !b !yt and other bang's to redirect search another website directly from ddg. (I use this when I do not like the responses and want to check another search engine)
sort of like google giving money to wikipedia, I suspect they do infact collect information on ddg searches and can aggregate it and make something useful from the information. in fact, they can probably infer that ddgs initial response was poor and determine their weaknesses etc
"At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well a US$150 million investment in Apple. It was also announced that Internet Explorer would be shipped as the default browser on the Macintosh. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates appeared at the expo on-screen, further explaining Microsoft’s plans for the software they were developing for Mac, and stating that he was very excited to be helping Apple return to success"
Apple was about to go under and Microsoft saved it in order to have a competitor.
Well only because DDG aggregates some of their stuff plus Microsoft ship everything to glue into Bing (windows login screens / default browser config / Cortana / XBox).
I know no one who consciously uses it to do anything other than my mother who uses it search for Google.
If none of the other default integrations exist it'd be dead on it's arse.
There are memes out there about people using it to search for porn and I've seen it referenced in forums, so there's at least one use case. Although why anybody has to actively /search/ for porn is beyond me.
I use it consciously! I'd rather not support Google, and after a few comparison searches between DDG and Google back in the day I used Google, I found DDG to be far inferior.
Plus Bing has nice background images (I use it as my homepage).
I like DDG, and use it, but it's mostly a pretty front end on a now-deprecated Bing API. If Bing shut down, DDG wouldn't be far behind.
I've never seen a DDG crawler in any of my logs, though I've seen plenty of Google and Bing (and others). DDG does some nice instant answer and bang stuff, but the actual deep search results are all Bing (and maybe Yandex?)
Sure, there's that, but Google really need competition for their own sake.
The US would not have put a man on the moon if it wasn't for the Soviet Union trying to do the same. Not having credible competition is bad from a purely professional point of view because you need someone to spur you on.
Since about 2003-2004 search has not really been a real competition in the west. Google has had an unhealthy dominance. I have worked for three search engine companies (Fast, Yahoo and Google) and I can remember how inspiring the early days were when there was half a dozen search engines to compete against.
I particularly enjoyed trying to figure out how the competition did things. At the time you had narrow problems people worked on that perhaps only a dozen other people in the world cared deeply about. Published research hadn't always caught up with what was happening so you spent some amount of time trying to read between the lines and measure things to figure out what the competition was up to.
One of my fondest memories is a lunch I had with Jeff Dean when I slid a napkin over the table with a graph on it. He took one look at it, smiled and said "did you figure it out?". I said "no, did you?". And he said "I have no idea".
Today search just exists and I no longer give a shit about it. It doesn't strike me as fun anymore. Because there is no real competition. I'm pretty sure that at least the engineers at Google would soil themselves with joy if they got a real competitor.
What constitutes competition ? If I put up a site serving Wikipedia, that nobody visits, am I a competitor to Wikipedia or Google ? Last time I checked, DuckDuckGo had < 0.2% market share. Aren't Bing and Yahoo enough already to justify competition ?
There's no reasonable amount of money that Google can charge for this that will make up for the amount of meetings they'd need to correctly determine the amount and get all the signoffs for it, and charging for it would also negatively impact the PR for it.
Though this is a good move, DuckDuckGo should really try and work toward taking ownership of http://ddg.com.
With the 'D' and 'G' key separated by just one key in between on a standard QWERTY keyboard, this should really make it exponentially easier to get to DuckDuckGo's homepage.
Even practical, since in browsers you can type "ddg" and press ctrl-enter and have it do the .com for you. I've found it's easier to just make ddg my default search engine though ;)
Does it really matter though? I generally only have to type it once on a new computer to add it to my web browser's search engine list (if it's not already there, which IIRC is the case in Firefox at least). Having a memorable name is much more important IMO.
This is cool and I hope it leads to a rebranding. While I like DDG a lot, the name has always felt off-putting to me. I'd much rather say "I'll just search Google" than "I'll just search DuckDuckGo."
Does an extra syllable really cause that much additional friction?
The two words can be strung together just fine in English. Think of the word "rub", then "rubs", then "rubs search", then "rubsearch". The final 'b' in "web" is indeed pronounced differently when linked to the word "search".
They can but it's more difficult on a muscle level. You have to change the position of your tongue quite a bit to alter the airflow transitioning from the bilabial plosive to the sibilant, versus "Google" where you can almost say the G-L transition without moving your mouth; just a very slight adjustment of your uvula and tongue can produce an understandable sound.
Try saying "web search" without moving your mouth. Now try saying "google" without moving your mouth.
It's not the number of syllables, it's the particular flow of those syllables and the number of full stops. I'm sure there's a linguistic term for what I mean. Consider "I'll just Googlify it" or "I'll just Dodogo it", which both sound better than "I'll just DuckDuckGo it".
GoDaddy manages to seem even more of a cheesy web 1.0 company than they are because of the name. It's like a TV ad company for the whole family, not something a programmer would find pleasing to behold.
I'm not sure how regional this is, but at least around the North of England that'd be interpreted as someone saying they were trying to avoid something.
"Google it" kinda came out organically. But it was very cringy when Microsoft forced to popularize the term "Bing it" and did product placements in TV shows and movies.
i allways thought of it as a play on duck duck goose(which has some interesting connotations and in this context). it is good they got duck.com and makes sense in recognition and a simple and easy name is good to if thats there intent.
DDG will never reach some groups without a rebrand.
I once installed Firefox on my folks's PC and changed the browser to DDG. My mum opened it instead of Chrome by mistake and said something like
> WTF is this duck thing? Where's Google?
I think that wouldn't have happened if it had a more serious name.
That said, my two-year old loves the yellow Cyberduck icon on my desktop Mac, and asks me to make it bounce (i.e. launch it from the Dock) whenever he sees it...
Eh. People mocked Google's name when they were gaining dominance. "Sounds like baby noise, not a serious company" seemed to be the dominant take of those with that view at the time.
I think there's something to three-word names being less memorable than shorter ones, especially when there isn't a clearer hint to function built in.
I always say, "Search for," e.g. "I searched for it online"
I hate how Google has become a verb and I don't want to see another one named after a company. I miss the days of Lycos, Hotbot, Dogpile, Excite and where you could search for terms on different engines and get different results.
Using, "google" as a verb pretty much started out as a meme-like phenomenon; a bit of an in-joke for the more tech savvy when Google was still rising to prominence.
As these things sometimes go, mass adoption happened. What used to be cute and funny is now free marketing for a search tech behemoth but with people unwilling to give up this initial connotation of "tech savvy."
I've long since reverted to "search online" or "search the web", but I do hope "to duck" gains some prominence; it could be the new "tech savvy" verb to use.
Be interesting to know how much $$$ passed hands on that deal - - - I don't think duck.com is similar enough to duckduckgo for a trademark dispute to rule in favor of duckduckgo, plus no smaller fish would go up against Google's legal ability . . . . now if they could just bag the URL for duckdynasty . . .
I don't see what's so nice about this if all they were doing was squatting on the domain. It's good that they stopped squatting, let's leave it at that.
The game where you tap tap two heads and all 3 of you run in a circle. At least two people collide and are knocked out. The 3rd gets the website they wanted.
I do feel like DuckDuckGo is too long to type. That's a barrier for me. Rebranding to just Duck might be a good thing, but why "duck" ... not my favorite animal, or why animal at all...
I type out DuckDuckGo once per browser I use, make it the default search engine, and never worry about the length again.
The concern about the branding is understandable, but I haven't typed "Google" or "DuckDuckGo" when I want to use their services in aeons, and I don't even make use of bookmarks.
This is not charity. Google needs DDG to exist, because Google is a monopoly. That economic reality is increasingly translating into political calls for GOOG to be broken up. Supporting DDG is just Google preparing for future legal and legislative/regulatory battles. They can point to DDG and say, "Look! There is another search company!"
Google also probably accelerated this potential action to this week because they're taking so much heat and needed positive press.
Two-letter TLDs are country codes. Republic of Serbia isn't that big of a stretch, especially since it's relatively new (2008) and there are already so many that follow .s* pattern.
Unless you create a new country, .go ain't happening.
That being said, Montenegro scored a freaking gold mine with .me.
I just looked up .io, and Wikipedia lists it as a British territory but also says that its in dispute and the only thing actually there are military bases for the US and UK. I wonder why it got a tld?
Two-letter TLDs are ccTLDs, and all the existing countries already have their ccTLDs. In order for this to happen, you'd need to have a new country spring into existence that can plausibly be abbreviated to .go, and then they would have to treat it like a faux-generic (like .io) instead of imposing registration/use restrictions as some countries do for their ccTLDs.
Technical question: Since DuckDuckGo uses Bing Ads, and Bing Ads have tracking that allow for remarketing, is there a point?
advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/audience-targeting/universal-event-tracking
I use also use ddg, but maps.google is far better for maps. So I mix both, using an addon, I can right click an address and send to google maps. Its a nice compromise.
maps.google.com is good for navigation but if you want to search for things and especially if you want to search for multiple things at once, bing is far better.
Here's an example: https://binged.it/2EhrUDm
I don't think you can line up multiple searches like that on Google. It's far and away my favorite feature of Bing.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadEdit: It doesn't roll of my fingers either, I didn't even type out the full name...
Every time I mention/recommend it to someone the response is always a blank stare followed by something along the lines of “I would never use that if only to avoid that horrible name / brand URL”. And I can’t say I blame them.
I feel like anyone who grew up in a region where duck, duck goose was a common game for children to play wouldn't be too confused about the name.
Not that being confused about the name or disliking it is a bad thing. But I like the name, and it's part of the reason I chose to start using DDG.
If they changed it to something more generic, I'd be less likely to keep using it because I'd feel less of a connection to the brand. If I'm going to use something that generic and corporate, then Binging sounds more fun than Ducking.
I do realize that potentially losing me as a user doesn't mean this would be a bad move for DDG overall.
Or it could also be the case that the same game is played, but with a different name. Tracing the etymology of the name would be pretty interesting. As you mentioned, the game of duck duck goose is unheard of in many places that have plenty of ducks and geese.
If they want to expand to non-English speaking countries having a long and somewhat complicated name like "duckduckgo" seems like a liability.
Maybe it is one of those names that could endear your company to a certain audience, but alienate it to a wider audience.
Part of the reason I use Bing is the name is nicer in my head. Also the background images are cool (it's my homepage).
It’s cute, but it’s antithetical to the idea of becoming a household word.
Is it some kind of inside joke? I just don't get it. I have nothing against the child's game; it just makes no sense to anyone that they named it after that, and it's not an easy name to pronounce or type. Bottom line: It sounds, feels, and looks bad on them.
And somehow that silly abstraction for "a big number number than yours" became a mega-behemoth of a corporation.
Google, Bing, Yahoo!, A9 Search, Excite, AltaVista, Overture, Inktomi, Lycos, HotBot, DogPile, Mamma.com., Teoma, Ask Jeeves, Cuil.
Those are all ridiculous names if you want to scale them by seriousness.
Then you have MSN Search, AOL / NetFind, InfoSeek, GoTo, LookSmart, WebCrawler, alltheweb. Slightly less ridiculous sounding, which ultimately that didn't make any difference.
He had acquired the name Duck Duck Go before deciding to create a search engine. So when he started he just used that name for his next project and it stayed.
It’s clearly due for some rebranding. Duck alone works great for that. It’s got some relavance to their current name, it’s short, there will never be a shortage of puns and word play.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/goggles
I need to duck the web to find out more about this. :)
If you change your name to duck, your name will no longer be searchable!
It's a trap!
That is a foul.
Or, more accurately, a water-foul.
Using an incognito window
Although the word search is mentioned in the info I would not make this out as a alternative search engine at first glance.
Since Google results almost always vary by geographic location, according to the bottom of the page, Google thinks I'm in "Bernalillo County, New Mexico."
I have no idea where that is. I haven't been to New Mexico in close to 20 years. I'm currently almost 1,000 miles away from New Mexico.
Good jorb, Google.
My wife and I used to breed ducks and have a duck farm. We were quack addicts, and quack dealers. I could go on and on.
1st result: Wikipedia Duck
2nd: Wooden Ducks
3rd: BBC duck recipes
4th: Toilet duck cleaner
5th: BBC iplayer, Sarah and Duck
It goes on. The only mention of duckduckgo on the first 5 pages is this recent news
Duck doesn't mean very much in Germany, so there's little that competes with duck.com. In Britain duck has many other meanings.
If you search for an abbreviation that's commonly used as company name, you may find that Google's top result is the one near you, and that the eponymous company in Petrapavlovsk isn't listed.
Edit: found it near the end of page 6! Alongside "Duck Donuts" and "London Duck Tours".
1st is EN wikipedia with "Duck"
2nd is DuckDuckGo
3rd and on is several restaurants with "duck" in the name.
So it probably is location/language related to some extend.
Once more, duckduckgo.com comes up as the first result. Once more, from _Germany_. "duck" is a German word (imperative, as in "duck and cover"), but it is really rare, so I would not be surprised if the search results were biased in favor of our new fowl overlords. But I don't think it's all filter bubble, either.
a. Top stories [not organic result]
1. Wikipedia
b. Maps to "duck" restaurants [not organic]
2. Wiktionary
3. allaboutbirds.org/guide/browse/shape/Ducks
4. Merriam Webster
5. Related article from theverge.com
6. duckduckgo.com
Top hit - duckduckgo.com
And it's already #1 for me (but that's likely because I've used the site before, and Google knows that)
Does Google buying DDG at this point make sense?
Given their stance on privacy, it would allow Google control of the narrative..
So a helping hand doesn't taint the DDG brand, buys good will, and provides competition to the defacto monopoly. Good move.
How much is a 4 letter domain worth these days? 10s - 100s of thousands?
[0] https://donttrack.us
The only reason I use it is because it isn't a Google company... well and the !bangs are good too.
I have been using DuckDuckGo because I'm making health related queries and I'm pretty scared of companies profiling me based on that.
But the experience with DDG has been worse, although it is definitely improving. And it's bearable, plus protecting my privacy is worth it.
Filter bubbles are personalized, so YMMV.
But if we exclude location as a factor, it's not much of an argument because I have the benefit of constantly using both Google and DuckDuckGo, where DDG is now the primary search engine and Google is the fallback.
If Google personalizes the results in a way as to bias the information based on my political views or whatever, that's not something I have noticed. And believe me, I'd like more ammo when I criticize Google, but this ain't it in my experience.
I'm Romanian and when searching in Romanian on DuckDuckGo I often get results in English, Spanish, Italian or French, because Romanian is a romance language.
Local searches are terrible on DDG.
When I'm in Japan, Google seems to try hard to give me results localized to Japan.
When I'm in the United States and need to get information about something in Japan, it can't cope with the fact that I'm not in Japan. Where Google thinks I am (even with location tracking turned off) is paramount. Even if I search google.co.jp, I get American results.
DDG feels like it gives me the same search results every time. Typically they are more helpful than google would have been early on but less helpful than googles were later on.
This is entirely anecdotal... Anyone else experience something similar?
It's extremely obvious/bad when you try Googling some old article about an topic, often political, that has recently regained popularity.
You can try adding all kinds of words from the headline, certain terms will always lead to the results being dominated with "current news", like with Russia/Ukraine or more recently with China.
Which is made worse by the inability to specify a time-frame for the search. In that regard, the best Google can do is narrow it down to "last changed" with the extended search, which only goes as far back as "last year", anything further back than that and you might as well have to find the needle by manually looking trough the haystack of pages upon pages of search results.
It can be extremely frustrating how search results are seemingly dominated by the very same, handful, of articles offering only the very same takes, with only slight variations. It feels quite similar to how YouTube keeps recommending the same kind of weird videos to a large amount of people, like you are being "funneled".
Which from the outside feels very similar to how YouTube tends to "harmonize" it's dynamic playlists aka "mixes" to such a point that all of them end up being the same after the first 1-2 songs because everything after that seems to be strictly based on personalization and not the original song the mix was created on.
Basically I would be interested in a sample where say a democrat gets different opinion pieces versus a republican, on the same search query.
I feel that such samples could exist, but I haven't witnessed such instances in my daily use.
Never said a thing about filter bubbles, but in a way, it feels like a self-reinforcing loop:
0 An article gets clicked often
1 Google ranks it higher in the results based on those higher click counts
2 It gets clicked even more often due to being ranked higher in the results
3 goto 0
Behavior like that might be fine when one is looking for something obscure technical to surface more relevant results.
But when it's applied to news articles it creates the impression of a bias/funnel as the top results will regularly consist of the same, slightly altered, headlines and conclusions. Which in part is probably the result of a lot of news-outlets just copy&pasting AP releases.
Note: I'm not saying this is done on purpose, it might very well just be a manifestation of the increased use of AI/ML where the end results often can't be properly explained/reasoned as the ML has become sort of a blackbox optimizing towards a given goal, like giving results that are more likely to be clicked.
Funny how I still don't see two links: 1. Google search for a keyword 2. DDC link for the same keyword
As I said, it's posturing.
I never felt google searches were bad, nor do I have problems with the results from ddg. This was just a privacy decision I guess, one that is easy to make with little sacrifice.
I like that it uses Yelp vs Google listings. Yelp has its issues but Google listings are usually less reliable.
Usually when I search for something I don't care about any of that, I just want to see the organic matches, not "People also ask" and "People also search for" widgets that are of no value to me.
DDG only has the wikipedia widget (which I actually find pretty useful generally) and sometimes the video or image carousel at the top which is sometimes relevant and doesn't waste a lot of screen real estate. I hope it'll continue that way.
Does this work? I was under the impression that had little to no impact on their tracking/suggestions for "personalization" purposes
they really have been upping their game and continue to do so. the other day, I was looking for a specific paper, not so old, from 2012. admittedly, for papers, I still use Google, I guess because of the link to G scholar.
I couldn't find it within about 5mins and switched to DDG. it was on p.1 of DDG. that was really great to see.
The main things I find myself still using the !g code for is news and maps. But for other searches I finally find I get just as good results.
https://duck.co/help/results/sources
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results.
So, the DuckDuckBot that you cited doesn't contribute to DDG's organic results?
90% of what Google returns to me is Wikipedia, IMDB, and other verticals anyway, so it's not that much different IME.
Correct.
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
Traditional links = organic results.
Both have in common that if they don't know the answer to your query, they assume they know better than you and give you unrelated results. I'd prefer if they'd just print "Can't find anything" and let me tweak my query instead of sending back random results.
Perhaps search engines could just not show you lower confidence results, but then you risk making it impossible to find certains kinds of content, and you forgo the rarer, but still extant wins, you get from showing those results.
Users can generally tell when results aren't relevant and will reformulate anyway.
I’m as de-Googled as I can be. I caught a lot of slack (?) from some people over it. But it’s a relief for me.
https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/8.8_cm_Flak_18/36/37/41
see: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flak
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo [2] https://duck.co/help/results/sources
That seems so strange. I cant think of any other times that a business has given charity to a direct competitor like this.
sort of like google giving money to wikipedia, I suspect they do infact collect information on ddg searches and can aggregate it and make something useful from the information. in fact, they can probably infer that ddgs initial response was poor and determine their weaknesses etc
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Apple was about to go under and Microsoft saved it in order to have a competitor.
https://www.mac-history.net/apple-history-tv/2008-07-19/macw...
I know no one who consciously uses it to do anything other than my mother who uses it search for Google.
If none of the other default integrations exist it'd be dead on it's arse.
From what I've heard their video search is superior.
> Although why anybody has to actively /search/ for porn is beyond me.
Specific tastes?
Plus Bing has nice background images (I use it as my homepage).
I like DDG, and use it, but it's mostly a pretty front end on a now-deprecated Bing API. If Bing shut down, DDG wouldn't be far behind.
I've never seen a DDG crawler in any of my logs, though I've seen plenty of Google and Bing (and others). DDG does some nice instant answer and bang stuff, but the actual deep search results are all Bing (and maybe Yandex?)
The DDG crawler is not used for organic results, only for stuff like the widgets. All organic results are from Bing and Yahoo (and possibly Yandex).
The US would not have put a man on the moon if it wasn't for the Soviet Union trying to do the same. Not having credible competition is bad from a purely professional point of view because you need someone to spur you on.
Since about 2003-2004 search has not really been a real competition in the west. Google has had an unhealthy dominance. I have worked for three search engine companies (Fast, Yahoo and Google) and I can remember how inspiring the early days were when there was half a dozen search engines to compete against.
I particularly enjoyed trying to figure out how the competition did things. At the time you had narrow problems people worked on that perhaps only a dozen other people in the world cared deeply about. Published research hadn't always caught up with what was happening so you spent some amount of time trying to read between the lines and measure things to figure out what the competition was up to.
One of my fondest memories is a lunch I had with Jeff Dean when I slid a napkin over the table with a graph on it. He took one look at it, smiled and said "did you figure it out?". I said "no, did you?". And he said "I have no idea".
Today search just exists and I no longer give a shit about it. It doesn't strike me as fun anymore. Because there is no real competition. I'm pretty sure that at least the engineers at Google would soil themselves with joy if they got a real competitor.
With the 'D' and 'G' key separated by just one key in between on a standard QWERTY keyboard, this should really make it exponentially easier to get to DuckDuckGo's homepage.
ddg.gg is the easiest to type, but would be a strange URL to send to a (non technical) person.
I believe hot keys win wars (partial reference to Starcraft/Warcraft)
Does an extra syllable really cause that much additional friction?
"I was ducking around and found a few good resources for fixing the OSPF problem."
See: https://youtu.be/2qunog47EVo for musical reference.
"I spent the day ducking around on the internet"
In casual conversation, "DeeDeeGee it" is so much more clunky.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_missile_destroyer
For more discussion see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(phonology)
Page 10 of http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/donegan/Papers/201Xhistph...
Try saying "web search" without moving your mouth. Now try saying "google" without moving your mouth.
(Note also that when you say "rubs", the "b" is not getting assimilated - it's the "s" that is getting assimilated into a voiced "z")
duck.com will surely inspire the sick dolan[0] crowd
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed3-vC2z7hI
Edit: somebody beat me to it.
I thought it was more of a sleaze connotation than a family one.
Although as noted by a person responding here "I'll duck it" wouldn't be bad.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4
> WTF is this duck thing? Where's Google?
I think that wouldn't have happened if it had a more serious name.
I think there's something to three-word names being less memorable than shorter ones, especially when there isn't a clearer hint to function built in.
I hate how Google has become a verb and I don't want to see another one named after a company. I miss the days of Lycos, Hotbot, Dogpile, Excite and where you could search for terms on different engines and get different results.
As these things sometimes go, mass adoption happened. What used to be cute and funny is now free marketing for a search tech behemoth but with people unwilling to give up this initial connotation of "tech savvy."
I've long since reverted to "search online" or "search the web", but I do hope "to duck" gains some prominence; it could be the new "tech savvy" verb to use.
Edit: lol
Search giant Google acquired the Duck.com domain name in 2010 with the acquisition of On2, a video codec company.
https://mobile.twitter.com/robshilkin/status/102045801917422...
> Search giant Google acquired the Duck.com domain name in 2010 with the acquisition of On2, a video codec company.
A few months ago, DuckDuckGo asked for the domain, Google agreed to give it to them for free, and the transfer took place today.
That doesn't really seem like squatting, at least not how the term is generally used.
I never remembered whether to type duckgogo.com or duckduckgo.com - either of them i had to type twice due to normal fat-fingering :)
duck.com!
The concern about the branding is understandable, but I haven't typed "Google" or "DuckDuckGo" when I want to use their services in aeons, and I don't even make use of bookmarks.
Google also probably accelerated this potential action to this week because they're taking so much heat and needed positive press.
DDG is just a frontend to Bing. They need Bing to exist, not DDG.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18664967
Unless you create a new country, .go ain't happening.
That being said, Montenegro scored a freaking gold mine with .me.
Also Tuvalu, which gets 10% of its total government revenue from selling .tv domains [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tv
See https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates for details.
It's good for navigation, and great for the "satellite" view.
Here's an example: https://binged.it/2EhrUDm I don't think you can line up multiple searches like that on Google. It's far and away my favorite feature of Bing.