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The curious case of DuckDuckGo

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Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#71

Post by morsch »

systems wrote: post #64
puredemo wrote: post #19

I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding. No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is gettin…

Well, in general I like the Duck Logo and brand Now checking possible duck domains Duck.com redirect to google! Duck.co points to a DDG community site! Goduck.com is for sales Duck.net is blocked from work so I guess its a porn thing What do you think will work as a good brand?

Duck.com redirect to google!

Huh. Well, that's fairly bizarre.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#72

Post by IsaacL »

fbuilesv wrote: post #22
puredemo wrote: post #19

I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding. No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is gettin…

Before Google we never Altavista'd or Yahoo'd anything, I don't see why this has to be a problem. Also, please stop abusing the word "pivot" :(

I agree. Google became a verb because the search engine was successful, not the other way around. Furthermore:

- Microsoft spent pots of cash trying to verbify their search engine with their "bing and decide" commercials. As far as I know, this hasn't worked for them.

- IIRC Google themselves tend to use the form "do a Google search" - or they risk losing their trademark.

- Duck Duck Go is a catchy name - three punchy syllables. (I've recently become a fan of The Name Inspector's blog).

- And people should definitely stop using "pivot" when they just mean "change". Or "disruptive" when they mean "new". It's the startup equivalent of the crystal healers who use words like "quantum" to sound more intelligent.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#73

Post by morsch »

berkes wrote: post #60
Tharkun wrote: post #47

I've been using DDG almost exclusively for about a year now. Every once in a while I'll do a google search because I can't find what I'm looking for on DDG. This is usually when I'm looking for something local/in a non-english language, or when I'm doing a search for a long string (say a couple of lines from a song lyric). One of google's biggest advantages -- for me at least -- is its localized URLs. google.co.uk, g…

Somehow, I still don't get Google's logic behind it. Too often I get thrown back to google.nl from .com. When I am certain that I need an American/English/Int result, I want to use google.com immediately, not .nl, but it takes me two or three times correcting the url before I get where I want to go. My solution for this is !g in duckduckgo: This brings me to the international Google.com, no matter what locales in the…

Hit http://www.google.com/ncr (no country redirection) once. I think it saves a cookie that will stop google.com from redirecting to a local google. Still works after years and years. See also http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#74

Post by giffo »

I just want something simple. DuckDuckGo just offers me more stuff/info I don't need. I don't need 4000 results I want the best correct result.

http://giffo.imgur.com/search_results

The link above are screenshots from a test page of a search engine project I gave up on last year due to burn out and that I just couldn't afford to get it to the online stage. Today I feel (as biased as I am) - it still does the job better than anything out there for me.

Because its simple.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#75

Post by unfasten »

mdaniel wrote: post #70
systems wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in general I like the Duck Logo and brand Now checking possible duck domains Duck.com redirect to google! Duck.co points to a DDG community site! Goduck.com is for sales Duck.net is blocked from work so I guess its a porn thing What do you think will work as a good brand?

I didn't know about duck.com. Does anyone know the story behind that?

From a previous discussion on it http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2027691 here's a quote from Gabriel:

"""To be fair, it came as an asset in an unrelated acquisition (On2). But it just sat their (pointing to this Duck Corporation history page) for a long time.

I first inquired about it on 11/4/09. After several attempts, I got back a response "from management" on 3/25/10 that they didn't want to sell it. Understandable.

Now http://www.on2.com/ points to a Google explanation page about the On2 acquisition, yet http://duck.com/ points directly to Google search."""

Also discussed a little bit on the DDG community forum: http://duck.co/topic/duck-com-redirects-to-google

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#77

Post by EwanToo »

magicalist wrote: post #61
sbashyal wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Google did show the correct results when I clicked on the link suggesting I was searching for the actual string. So it was on their menu all the time. I also communicated my request correctly to the other end; the other end deliberately changed my order!

no, it really is a terrible analogy :) the menu contains almost every word in almost every language that's online (plus many misspellings and made up words and lists of meaningless character permutations and...), so if you are going to automatically correct a query, some set of words that are on the menu are going to have to be excluded. On the other hand, if we accept that this case was suboptimal, the solution seem…

I'm pretty sure that Google being Google, they did exactly this kind of testing.

Put 500k people in bucket 1, and 500k people in bucket 2, and see what happens.

It's pretty obvious to me that the vast majority of times I see that correction message, that I've actually misspelt a word, and that it's pretty rare that I did actually want to search for "dictonary".

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#78

Post by epi0Bauqu »

dale-cooper wrote: post #76

I don't understand the complaints about auto-correction. At least google shows you that it does, DDG just does it without giving you any indication. Try " http://duckduckgo.com/?q=pyqt+glp and it will actually search for "pyqt gpl"

This is actually a bug that we are working through. Thank you for the specific example. Our intention is to always respect the query.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#79

Post by JoeAltmaier »

sbashyal wrote: post #49
ansy wrote: post #20

This is really an example of taking Google's strengths and making them out to be weaknesses. Google's search algorithm is tuned to what actually works for most people. Does anyone search for Java and click on coffee links? Or links for Java the island in Indonesia? Based on these results I would bet not. The thousands if not millions of people that typed Java before you didn't want coffee or islands. They wanted the…

Google's search algorithm is tuned to what actually works for most people. Yes. And that is where I think it goes wrong. The fact that a lot of people misspell should not be used to correct a person's right search to a wrong one. That's not the right thing to do. It should suggest a different search, but not change my search altogether. As an example, if I place an order for a Chicken Burrito but am served a Beef Bur…

Tyranny of the majority. The ultimate expression is to remove the search box altogether and just show the most popular porn sites - because that's the most frequently searched-for result.

Or just show the Wikipedia article on Philosophy :)

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#80

Post by alohahacker »

its crazy that through marketing and all the push DuckDuckGo is getting that they only get searched 250,000 times a day.

With the hundreads of millions of searches that go on everyday you would think they could pull a little bit more.

I guess it truly is hard for people to change who they search with after all is said and done.

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