Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Here’s one problem I have with DuckDuckGo.

I know DuckDuckGo have acquired the domain duck.com. Occasionally after an unfruitful Google search I would think, maybe I should give DDG a try. Since duck.com is easier to type than duckduckgo.com, I would visit duck.com. But duck.com would direct me to a stupid landing page that asks me to “Add DuckDuckGo to ...” or “Install DuckDuckGo” on iOS. There’s a teeny tiny “or try a private search first” line at the very bottom where I can click to reveal the search box. What the hell? The landing page makes me 300% more likely to just leave, instead of adding or installing it.

You can try it yourself: https://duck.com

(Btw, almost every time I land on Quora, that post by DDG CEO shows up as promoted. Kinda tired by now.)

Edit: To be fair to them, I noticed only just now that the box could be dismissed with a close button or clicking anywhere outside, so clicking on “or try a private search first” isn’t the only way. However, in my defense, the close button blends pretty well into the image, and being able to click outside is unclear since unlike modals elsewhere, there’s absolutely nothing behind.

I still fail to see why they have to hide the search box.

On their main site, start.duckduckgo.com will get rid of any of the "first time user" popups. They added it specifically to address the user concern of "I block cookies" users, who had no way to permanently turn off the messages.

I checked with start.duck.com and s.duck.com, and neither of them redirect properly. Seems like a semi-obvious oversight. If the popup is genuinely necessary, it would be nice to have a quick way to avoid it.

I still fail to understand why they cannot see why stopping people from doing what they surely came to the site for is a bad idea. The sizes of the things should be swapped: big search bar, tiny button on the bottom to install it in your favorite browser. But that’d just be their normal website…

It might be because I’ve already used DuckDuckGo on my browser and have turned off those things in the settings, but duck.com just redirects me to a clean DDG homepage.

Maybe it’s controlled by a cookie. On my tablet now so can’t verify, but I definitely still get that landing page even after using the site for quite some times (I didn’t look into settings).

It’s simply strange that they would try to coerce a first time visitor to install their app, and hide the search box behind some fine print.

Why not use ddg.gg? Even shorter.

TIL. The point still stands.

Edit: Wow, this one downvoted to negative. Guess I pissed off a few true believers. You may argue why the point doesn’t stand, instead of just downvoting, or, say, giving me a helpful and condescending primer on switching search engine.

Anyway, I don’t harbor ill feelings toward DDG. I’m pointing this out because I think the dark pattern here will genuinely hurt adoption, even if to a minuscule extent.

Yes, I agree. They shouldn't force people to dismiss some popup.

“duck.com” is lower cognitive overhead to me than “ddg.gg”.

That is an excellent and highly relevant gripe. I've submitted it to the DDG subreddit, which appears to be the principle mechanism for reaching DDG these days.

https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/e14lht/the_duck...?

I switched to DuckDuckGo in my browsers, so now I just type search terms in the address bar. When I need non-personalized Google results I add "!s" at the end and DDG redirects me to Startpage. When I need personalized results I use "!g" instead. There are other operators (like !w for Wikipedia search), and you can add bang commands at the beginning like this: "s! search term" - or end like this: "search term !s"

I know how to switch the default search engine, thank you.

None of this has to do with the complaint.

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