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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

#421

Post by usr1106 »

IronBacon wrote: post #331
vhakulinen wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...I won't have to type in the full DuckDuckGo.com domain. You can also use ddg.gg.

Thanks wasn't aware of that. Anyway, I use the Firefox "smart bookmarks" (I don't know if it's the correct name), i.e. naming the bookmark search, so "gg foo" is for searching foo on Google, "dd bar" is for searching bar on DuckDuck, "w baz" is for Wikipedia, "dbts #number" is for the "Debian bug tracking system" and so on...

Nice, I wasn't aware of this feature. "Smart keywords" is the correct name. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#422

Post by mda »

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.

Yes they do, mostly bing + yahoo and yandex. Do they give which percentage of backends they use for any non trivial search?

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#423

Post by fooker »

youeseh wrote: post #379
cachvico wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this not just a classic example of HN looking for the negative in every positive? No. Google has the monopoly on search (outside of China). Avoiding anti-trust is a huge concern of theirs. Look at MS and IE in the browser wars - they were forced by the EU to build into Windows links/ads to the other browsers - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu#/media/File:B... Whilst DDG has huge momentum by now…

ddg.gg is easier to type and for my fingers to remember than duck.com.

How about duck + (Ctrl + enter) ?

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#424

Post by mda »

utopcell wrote: post #376
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.

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

plus they really sell themelves as the all gloriuos knight, savior of people from evils of big bad wolf. Fine, but who is actually under the shiny helmet? Answer is not that glorious. The knight is just a puppet.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#425

Post by freeflight »

bad_user wrote: post #353
freeflight wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple example here being how Google seems to prioritize "current news", particularly those clicked the most often, over actual search results. Which from the outside feels very similar to how YouTube tends to "harmonize" it's dynamic playlists aka "mixes" to such a point that all of them end up being the same after the first 1-2 songs because everything after that seems to be strictly based on personalization an…

Prioritizing current news might be annoying, but it can't be a filter bubble, as we aren't talking of personalisation. Basically I would be interested in a sample where say a democrat gets different opinion pieces versus a republican, on the same search query. I feel that such samples could exist, but I haven't witnessed such instances in my daily use.

> Prioritizing current news might be annoying, but it can't be a filter bubble

Never said a thing about filter bubbles, but in a way, it feels like a self-reinforcing loop:

0 An article gets clicked often

1 Google ranks it higher in the results based on those higher click counts

2 It gets clicked even more often due to being ranked higher in the results

3 goto 0

Behavior like that might be fine when one is looking for something obscure technical to surface more relevant results.

But when it's applied to news articles it creates the impression of a bias/funnel as the top results will regularly consist of the same, slightly altered, headlines and conclusions. Which in part is probably the result of a lot of news-outlets just copy&pasting AP releases.

Note: I'm not saying this is done on purpose, it might very well just be a manifestation of the increased use of AI/ML where the end results often can't be properly explained/reasoned as the ML has become sort of a blackbox optimizing towards a given goal, like giving results that are more likely to be clicked.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#426

Post by vhakulinen »

IronBacon wrote: post #331
vhakulinen wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...I won't have to type in the full DuckDuckGo.com domain. You can also use ddg.gg.

Thanks wasn't aware of that. Anyway, I use the Firefox "smart bookmarks" (I don't know if it's the correct name), i.e. naming the bookmark search, so "gg foo" is for searching foo on Google, "dd bar" is for searching bar on DuckDuck, "w baz" is for Wikipedia, "dbts #number" is for the "Debian bug tracking system" and so on...

I have ddg as my default search engine in firefox, so by default my searches go to ddg. If I want to use google instead, I just add "!g" to some part of the search query and ddg will do its magic and do the same search on google. These are called bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#427

Post by HeavyStorm »

cachvico wrote: post #335
johnfn wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this not just a classic example of HN looking for the negative in every positive? Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy and MS pushed them off it. Conversely, DDG is nowhere near bankruptcy and although it may be easier to type, a shorter domain name is not going to drastically increase the competitive edge that DDG has over google. To me they seem in totally different categories.

> Is this not just a classic example of HN looking for the negative in every positive? No. Google has the monopoly on search (outside of China). Avoiding anti-trust is a huge concern of theirs. Look at MS and IE in the browser wars - they were forced by the EU to build into Windows links/ads to the other browsers - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu#/media/File:B... Whilst DDG has huge momentum by now…

How is having the duck.com dns a trust issue? Google could just as easy create some purpose for it and ddg would have a hard time proving that a domain that does not have its product name to be inflicting monopoly.

Conversely, how does transferring the domain helps Google on court? If they are a monopoly, then surely it isn't because of naming.

(I do defy the affirmation that Google has a monopolity at all - Bing and ddg are likely alternatives that anyone can use - it's very different from, let's say, IBM mainframes... But I'm no expert in antitrust laws)

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#428

Post by adrr »

tomcatfish wrote: post #413
adrr wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's why I put two years. I don't think any company would agree to a longer term.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#429

Post by Calib3r »

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…

ConnectionLeaseTimeout?

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#430

Post by bhandziuk »

electrograv wrote: post #304
bhandziuk wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a "Google"? It's not even a word. It caught on though.

The most important thing for a brand name like this to be is: 1. Simple to remember and easy to pronounce. 2. Unique and stands out from other generic names. 3. Aesthetically sounds/looks good. Under this criteria: "Google" works. "Bing" works. "DuckDuckGo" does not work.

I always figured it was simple because of the Duck Duck Goose correlation. It certainly stands out. And I do like it because of the Duck Duck Good implication. I think fitting those 3 criteria is personal taste.
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