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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

#411

Post by SeanLuke »

In the 1980s an engineer named Dave Smith, who ran a very popular music synthesizer outfit called Sequential Circuits, proposed an open protocol for connecting music synthesizers. The idea was scoffed at by a number of manufacturers, but relatively soon Roland, and eventually the other major Japanese firms (Korg, Yamaha, Kawai) got on board, and that caused everyone else to join in. The standard became known as MIDI.

In the late 80s, Sequential Circuits went belly up due to some bad product decisions. Yamaha bought the remnants of the company, and Smith himself went to work at Korg, where he helped develop an important line of machines (the Wavestation).

In 2002 Smith decided to try again with his own company. As Yamaha owned the Sequential Circuits name, he settled on Dave Smith Instruments (or DSI). The company did quite well in its own boutique business (high-quality analog polyphonic synthesizers).

In 2015, Roland's founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, who had collaborated with Smith on MIDI, went to Takuya Nakata, the President of Yamaha -- a 3.5 billion dollar revenue company mind you -- and together they decided to unilaterally give Smith the famous Sequential Circuits trademark back as a thank-you and gesture of good-will. Kakeshashi said "I feel that it’s important to get rid of unnecessary conflict among electronic musical instrument companies. That is exactly the spirit of MIDI. For this reason, I personally recommended that the President of Yamaha, Mr. Nakata, return the rights to the Sequential name to Dave Smith." DSI has since been renamed Sequential.

I'm not sure Smith was even aware of their plan. Two of the most powerful people in the music instrument business just gave him his famous company name back for free.

I like to think Google was doing this.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#412

Post by utopcell »

zuron7 wrote: post #407
utopcell wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no DDG results: DDG serves Bing results. What you are really saying is that you prefer Bing to Google results.

No they aren't. DuckDuckGo does add some of their own stuff in there. Ending up with different results. You can verify.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo [2] https://duck.co/help/results/sources

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#413

Post by tomcatfish »

adrr wrote: post #357
cosmojg wrote: post #274

NamePros user, Thelma, made a good point: > The story of Microsoft floating a significant loan to Apple in order to keep Apple solvent in the late '90's is well-known. Microsoft didn't do so out of altruistic impulse; they did so to decrease the odds they'd be the target of anti-trust legislation. I'm sure the c-suite at Google is very aware of that history lesson, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more likely anti…

They could have sold it for $1 with a clause stating that ddg wouldn't partake in any antitrust action brought by any foreign government for 2 years. Value to Google would be worth tens or hundreds of millions in potential fines or revenue risk.

Then DDG obviously would have just said no? I think the idea is that it was a political move meant to show a sense of goodwill between the two to the public, not to force DDG to be subservient to them in some way.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#415

Post by brynjolf »

jedberg wrote: post #385
zenexer wrote: post #215

Meta: NamePros tech admin here. This hammered our servers so hard that we actually uncovered a fairly obscure bug in Nginx's FastCGI caching. It's gone unnoticed for years, including during rigorous load testing.

Nginx has had some strange bugs under heavy load. Way back in the day, reddit used Nginx as its frontend webserver/load balancer. All of a sudden one day I noticed that it was sending 99% of the traffic to the app server listed first in the config, then 99% of the remaining traffic to the next one, and so on down the line, such that the last app server in the list (only about 10 at the time) was essentially getting n…

How does it feel knowing you spend everyday enabling people who send death threats and are influenced by Russian bots? I mean all your efforts just make the internet overall a worse place. Must be hard.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#416

Post by dang »

brynjolf wrote: post #415
jedberg wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nginx has had some strange bugs under heavy load. Way back in the day, reddit used Nginx as its frontend webserver/load balancer. All of a sudden one day I noticed that it was sending 99% of the traffic to the app server listed first in the config, then 99% of the remaining traffic to the next one, and so on down the line, such that the last app server in the list (only about 10 at the time) was essentially getting n…

How does it feel knowing you spend everyday enabling people who send death threats and are influenced by Russian bots? I mean all your efforts just make the internet overall a worse place. Must be hard.

Uncivil comments will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting to HN. That means commenting civilly and substantively, or not at all.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#417

Post by konart »

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.

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.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#418

Post by Kiro »

utopcell wrote: post #412
zuron7 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they aren't. DuckDuckGo does add some of their own stuff in there. Ending up with different results. You can verify.

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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo [2] https://duck.co/help/results/sources

Can someone explain why all the comments mentioning this get downvoted? utopcell even links to DuckDuckGo directly where they openly confirm it.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#419

Post by nimbosa »

zenexer wrote: post #359
nimbosa wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nice live stats monitor, can you link a short short postmortem analysis under that, shortly? Thanks!

Yup, it'll be on there once I finish debugging. Edit: I'm having trouble reproducing it in a controlled environment, so a proper post mortem is probably going to have to wait for another day.

true that, some corner cases only appear in the wild and very hard to reproduce as we don't really know what caused them, anyways, keep us updated.. ;)
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