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Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

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Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#171

Post by basil-rash »

simias wrote: post #113
rpeden wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's a geographic thing? 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 f…

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 am a native English speaker, and I played duck duck goose as a kid, and I didn't make the connection until just now.

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).

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#172

Post by faiz7412 »

owaty wrote: post #156
Arkdy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Trinbagonian dialect, "ducking" is the act of skipping work/school. See: https://youtu.be/2qunog47EVo for musical reference.

"Ducking" is also a term used in audio mixing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducking

"Are you good at ducking mate? Let's party!"

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#173

Post by Kiro »

ddtaylor wrote: post #9

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.

As usual, I feel I need to point out that DDG gets all its results from Bing and Yahoo.

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.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#174

Post by dirkgently »

freeflight wrote: post #115
bad_user wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 Chi…

To me, it seems all this long explanation is just posturing when a simple example would have proven your point.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#175

Post by verelo »

barrow-rider wrote: post #82
dweekly wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suggested title of blog post announcing change: "Duck Yeah!"

I rarely use the term "ducking" in conversation, though auto-correct thinks otherwise. Maybe now I will. "I was ducking around and found a few good resources for fixing the OSPF problem."

Finally auto correct of "ducking" from the ruder alternative will make sense.

"I spent the day ducking around on the internet"

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#176

Post by jerf »

burkaman wrote: post #47
sjroot wrote: post #12

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?

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".

Euphony: http://literary-devices.com/content/euphony

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#178

Post by vanadium »

nickjj wrote: post #151
electrograv wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, rather than saying “Google it” maybe we can now say “Duck it”.

I can't wait to start saying "Go Duck yourself", and have it meant to be a request / complement to search your own name.

"Let me duck that for you" might get a few doubletakes.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#179

Post by laurent123456 »

ddtaylor wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#180

Post by krylon »

krylon wrote: post #85
projectramo wrote: post #4

Don't fall for it duckduckgo! If you change your name to duck, your name will no longer be searchable! It's a trap!

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.

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.

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