Comment by andrewljohnson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewljohnson | Hacker News Reader

There is a rash of this kind of marketing I see cropping up on Hacker News, marketing which promotes one company while badmouthing another. We saw it from Posterous, Adioso, and now DuckDuckGo.

* Adioso vs. Bing: http://blog.adioso.com/sorry-bing-adioso-is-still-the-worlds...

* Posterous vs. Tumblr (and others): http://blog.posterous.com/hey-tumblr-users-got-comments-want...

Setting aside whether or not you want to be perceived as cutthroat or just straight-up douchey, the real question is whether or not this the most effective spin.

I think it might be better just to talk about how great privacy is at DuckDuckGo, perhaps in comparison to other search engines in general.

DDG calling out Google individually, Adioso calling out Bing individually, or in the case of Posterous, calling out other startups, isn't how I would play the game.

I'm obviously biased, but I thought about this a lot before doing this page. First off, I tried to take the informative approach, not the badmouthing approach. In fact, this is the most informative page about search privacy I know about. You may reasonably disagree I got there, but that was indeed the goal.

Second, for most people, Google is search. So not talking about them in the context of search is almost useless. In other words, there is no real way to talk up DDG privacy without explaining what happens when you use Google. It just isn't meaningful because most people don't know what the baseline is.

IHMO this is classy, smart marketing on your part. And it happens to be championing privacy concerns. More power to you.

I think it might be better just to talk about how great privacy is at DuckDuckGo, perhaps in comparison to other search engines in general.

Except there are no other search engines, in practical terms.

So why actually say Google? People will just get it, without having to single out a company. Let them make the leap.

There's the anecdote that some portion of casual Windows users don't know what an "Internet browser" is, they just click the little blue "e" on the desktop. Google is a brand name they'll associate with searching. Was it wrong for Firefox to target IE when there were other browsers which potentially had security concerns?

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