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Google competitor DuckDuckGo says it's getting shut out

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Re: Google competitor DuckDuckGo says it's getting shut out

#161

Post by vidarh »

neya wrote: post #149
irahul wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What appears to be just a text box and a logo has a lot of details. And since it appears as a text box and a logo, doesn't it make the point about having a lot of details moot? It's slightly different than google or bing, but vastly similar. Let's not make shit up here. > (Yet, you run a web-development company...cool story bro!) Take a breath. Web development isn't the same as web design. It's kinda sad that I hav…

>Web development isn't the same as web design. The one you claim to do on your homepage talks about involving design, which is why I referenced it. And which you absolutely have no idea about. >Instead of making shit up, you could have just said it's using a lot more gradients. It's more than just using just gradients (which is just one thing), which was my point. See, you're just proving it time and again. >I will b…

You're making a total fool of yourself with these aggressive and rude replies.

Re: Google competitor DuckDuckGo says it's getting shut out

#162

Post by ricardobeat »

ck2 wrote: post #65
ricardobeat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First attempt: http://cl.ly/image/340S0R3b0K0d

Those aren't actually website results. Those are links to entries for the single word on other sites, then followed by bing results. How often do you do single word searches in the realworld?

Both are search/website results. "Links to entries on other sites" are exactly that, and DDG's special sauce is presenting third-party results contextually.

As for "followed by bing results", there is a single one that is equal to bing. The results that follow are also far from similar (this is exacerbated by Bing insisting on giving me local results regardless of relevance, which DDG purposedly avoids).

And yes, I do single word searches very often, but if you're so inclined, here are results for a longer search: http://cl.ly/image/0m1E3I3J0M1U (DDG shows Hulu, tv.com, CTV, amazon, and doesn't repeat the Wikipedia entry)

Re: Google competitor DuckDuckGo says it's getting shut out

#163

Post by icebraining »

shawn-butler wrote: post #114
icelancer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS spent gazillions of dollars trying to do it with Bing and isn't close yet. Google is simply the best service out there by a very wide margin. When people close the gap, there will be a viable alternative. There's no cosmic law that says there needs to be an alternative to product X.

I have no access to the internal budgets of Microsoft so I can't really comment intelligently. I am a cross-platform smartphone developer so I use wp7, wp8 as well as Google APIs daily in order to do my work and bing doesn't seem so bad for consumer oriented searches. YMMV. For the queries I execute, I agree their results are subpar. But I feel compelled to respond. If there is no alternative to Google for something…

Instead of supporting yet another closed engine and hoping that they -or whoever happens to control it in the future- won't screw you, you could do what I did for a while, and run an instance of Yacy[1] on your own computer or VPS.

[1]: http://yacy.net/en/index.html

Re: Google competitor DuckDuckGo says it's getting shut out

#164

Post by adventured »

patrickaljord wrote: post #97
adventured wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of Scott McNealy complaining about Microsoft instead of beating them with products in the market, while his company was busy imploding and becoming irrelevant. That's DDG's future if they go the route of whining instead of competing. Linux, Google, Apple, Oracle, Intuit, (and countless open source software like Apache) et al. demonstrated time and time again that Microsoft could be trounced. Yet there was…

At least Sun did Java, what has Weinberg brought with DDG? Nothing.

Sun was responsible for a lot of tremendous technology (understatement of the year), the only point was that while McNealy was whining, his company was burning.

Re: Google competitor DuckDuckGo says it's getting shut out

#165

Post by ebrenes »

irahul wrote: post #156
ebrenes wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not whether the brand can be abbreviated or not, it's what you choose to build your brand around. A short, easy to remember name is crucial [1]. You don't hear much about International Business Machines, but you do hear a bit about IBM, because IBM built it's brand around the abbreviated form which is easier to remember. Likewise, HP is now the word du jour to refer to Hewlett-Packard. Abbreviated forms are fine…

I am not questioning building a brand. As I said elsewhere, in blind tests, people have a hard time distinguishing google search results from bing. Brand name is one of the major factors when it comes to consumers. People preferred pepsi to thumsup in blind tests. Thumsup sweetened its drink and faced a major backlash. Thumsup drinkers associated themselves with Thumsup brand and took pride in "not sweet as pepsi". I…

As I see it, using DDG instead of DuckDuckGo is not the core problem. It's not that doing so dilutes the brand (it does in way, but that's really irrelevant) I think the main point is that if the users feel compelled to rename then there is something in the original brand name which is inefficient or cumbersome which thus detracts from the brand's overall value.

And I do not think it's ridiculous to assume that repetition builds brand awareness. The study I linked to said as much, indicating that repetition was one of the best ways to establish brand identity in the minds of consumers. That's why as a company you're best served by aligning your brand name with whatever moniker people are more likely to use and hence why a short, memorable brand name is more powerful than a unique but long-winded archaic name (at least in this day and age).

Re: Google competitor DuckDuckGo says it's getting shut out

#166

Post by boyter »

ck2 wrote: post #46
boyter wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone ever seen DuckDuckBot hit their site? I don't have any web property large to appear via DuckDuckBot, but maybe someone else does? Im fairly certain it crawls Quora, as via this tweet https://twitter.com/yegg/status/33693491838066688

It's not just you. Maybe he only crawls the Alexa top 10k or some similar minimal set.

Follow up to this (its been a week so probably nobody will see this)

http://techzinglive.com/page/1028/179-tz-interview-gabriel-w...

around the 70 minute mark Gabriel mentions that DuckDuckBot is mostly about determining if pages are spam.

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