Google competitor DuckDuckGo says it's getting shut out

Is it PR bullshit? It probably is, but are their claims entirely wrong. If you see my comments, they are not entirely baseless.

Let's not kid ourselves, Google is a good company but they have to defend their position. Not just DuckDuckGo, but even your supposed billion dollar search engine will face same issues mentioned in the article. So this is not about the DuckDuckGo as a company but about monopolistic practices. Let's talk about that.

First of all, in my opinion, executing a frighteningly ambitious idea[1] is like performing inception. You need the simplest version of the idea for it to be "planted" in the user's mind.

People aren't using DDG much not because of any difficulties in the browser, because they don't want to. This is a very lame excuse. Google never won its users because they were able to convince users to set their Search Engine as default in their browsers.

As for DDG, the problem starts their name - "DuckDuckGo". You don't need to be an analyst with years of experience to say that this won't work because even their name is not something that is a)Catchy b)Easily rememberable c)Simple. Contrast this with Google. That's just one quick, easy to remember word. Now compare, Duck+Duck+Go. That's three words and it seems long. It looks like they didn't put much thought into this. This is not to say that DDG didn't do their homework properly, but just that it seems a little immature, given their name and their strategy. It looks more like they just read PG's essay[1] and started something out of the quick inspiration.

To kill a huge competitor like Google, you need to provide more value. Google is very hard to kill right now because, 1)Their search is vastly superior 2)a lot of people are locked into their ecosystem 3)They have created a valuable brand. No, by locked, I don't mean it's a bad thing. For example, I use Gmail, Google Contacts, Calendar, Blogger, Google Apps for my domains and a lot of other stuff because I want to. A single sign-in into their Eco-system lets me use all these services. And now, the best part is there's Android which seems to integrate all these things so easily like a snap that makes my life just a breeze.

So, first you need to understand that Google is now more than a search engine. Because if it was, Bing would have overtook it long back. You need to analyze the reasons why people still use Google. It's not just a search engine that they're using it for. Google has taken years and years to build the trust factor into their users. It has taken them years to make all these users "fit" into their eco-system and create a tremendously valuable brand . It's not like that they did it in just one day. So, just starting a new search-engine and expecting people to join on board is not going to happen. Despite so many "Ad" controversies, Google is still the king here because of the trust factor that no one else in the industry is able to provide. The trust factor that they will remain here, unlike the rest is the most important value that they provide to their users.

If you want to kill Google at this instant, you are going to do a lot more hardwork than you thought you should do, you need a brand of similar magnitude and the important essence here is the time and trust factor which everyone seems to ignore.

[1]http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

DDG is really only displaying definitions, aside from hacker.org. Given that this is a dictionary "word", I'm not sure how much of this query is really due to indexing and how much is due to identification of it as a singular word. Because there is so much query specific customization with search engines, (context-dependent results), it's hard to identify what results would have been returned from their raw indexes.

If you adjust the term to "hacker movie", you get more similar results between DDG and Bing. But, overall, it does seem like DDG is returning more differing results now than in the past.

They definitely use Bing as their backbone as Gabriel has said somewhere before.

Although you might be right about DuckDuckGo and similar search engines, the article is not claiming that DuckDuckGo is best search engine in the world since it is subjective. It is up to user to make that choice, and given the network effects, that won't happen unless user can easily switch to it. It is about making it even harder for a supposedly better search engine than Google to acquire users.