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Comment by TonyTrapp | Hacker News Reader

When "to google" has literally become a verb in several languages, you know it's not going to be that easy to convince literally hundreds of millions of people to use something different. For many unsavvy people, Google is and continues to be their window into the web, and they wouldn't even know they can have it another way.

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I wish Duck Duck Go was fewer syllables so I could try to force it into conversations as a verb.

Definitely poor branding. It needs much better 2025 branding and it’ll probably take off in this AI search era where results are really poor tbh and very inaccurate at times.

let me quack that for you

Did you find that on quack?

They own duck.com. They should revert to that.

Why don’t you “kagi” that? Could work, but it’s not free (but very worth it IMO).

People said this about AOL for a long time, too.

Sure, and that also didn't vanish in a day. All I'm saying is that there is a ton of inertia, and people will not be switching to something different in an instant.

People (including me) said this for a long time about Yahoo! too. Kinda ironic they both merged and basically died together…

Yawho!?

Jawohl!

I don’t think AOL ever topped 40 million users while a significant chunk of humanity uses Google. This entire conversation hinges on their unprecedented scale and reach, I don’t think this is an apt comparison.

You miss the 'A' in AOL.

You don’t have to convince hundreds of millions of people to use something different, you can just use something different.

I have been using something different for over ten years now. It doesn't seem to have much of an effect. Do you have another suggestion for me?

It's a seemingly patronizing joke meme, but I've repeatedly seen many of my relatives type in e.g. "Facebook.com" into Google search box, and then blindly click the first entry (which is completely at the mercy of being hijacked/prioritized based on either who's paying more money to Google, or latest fun extension / glitchy website they've installed).

I have not yet found a working approach to alter that behaviour - obligatory XKCD reference [0]

0: https://xkcd.com/763/

So true and the holy grail of being the first entry fuels the industry of reviews and stars which fuels the industry of bad review removal services etc and so on. This is such a vast ecosystem and so humiliating for the participants that it is only logical to let AI write, read and handle it. This is our chance to get a life. Lets not squander it.

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