I think DuckDuckGo would do better changing that Quack of a name | Hacker News Reader

I think DuckDuckGo would do better changing that Quack of a name

60 pointsaravindc92 comments

I completely agree.

I've said this every time the issue has come up: I think the name is hurting, a lot. More than once, I've wanted to just try a quick search on DDG to see it's comparison to Google, and at least some of those times, I've given up because writing duckduckgo is annoying. Is this logical/rational? NO. Is this how I, at least, behave? YES.

And for anyone saying that you can set up your browser to search DDG automatically, that's great if you've already bought into DDG, but it's not something I would do right off the bat.

You can set up a keyword search for DDG (for example ddg or just d) and use that when you want to compare. In Chrome, Firefox or Opera just right click in search form and select something along the lines of creating new search, and fill out the keyword.

I have a search keyword even for Google (g), my default search engine is "Feeling Lucky". Other keywords I use are (y)outube, wolfram(a)lpha, google (i)mages, t(orrentz), (m)aps (not google), (r)eddit (not a search per-se, just for opening subreddits), and a few others. For wikipedia, imdb, documentations, .. the feeling lucky is enough.

This will not take DuckDuckGo mainstream.

Yes, you can. But you have to think about it, and put a little bit of effort into it, at a moment you really want to do a quick search.

It makes switching a step with some friction, instead of making it possible to 'ease into it' by simply starting to do some search with ddg quickly.

(Heh, notice that many people in this forum write ddg for duckduckgo? I just made two typos typing that in. It's rather unlikely this is not costing them badly).

I would not so quickly recall 'ddg', if I didn't have 'duckduckgo' as a memory aid. But when I visit the site I always type ddg.gg - so maybe that should be where duckduckgo.com redirects instead of vice versa?

FWIW, you can use http://ddg.gg instead (think of it as "DuckDuckGOGOGO!)

Most people don't seem to know that search engines exist. The impression I get from non-technical people that I know is that they think of search engines as being somehow "part of the browser" or "part of the Internet". They often don't even know which one they use. They'll refer to searching as "Googling", but they're using Bing because it was the default with IE or they're using SuperGreatSearch 3.0 because Norton installed it and they haven't noticed the difference.

And you're suggesting that in a market like this, a silly name is a bad thing?

This is definitely a good point; by far most people have no clue what search is and they just type their queries in whatever is given by default. Unless Duck gets installed on computers by default, no one will use it relatively, whatever name it has. The problem is that we are not begin 2000 (or before); everyone has devices with internet and most of these people don't have any technical knowledge; not even enough to know the concept of an URL. A thing like Google, if there would be a new 'revolution' now, would not work as it did then; you need hardware companies to deliver at least the choice. And given the choice maybe 'the people' like Duckduckgo better than 'Bing' (I think they heard Google too much in the news to not pick that)?

Most people definitely use whatever is preset in the browser, at least until someone shows them something better. But regarding the name, the situation is very similar to the one with Microsoft Word: if it isn't called that ("MS Word" ... or "Google"), it isn't "the real thing" and somewhat suspicious, people will refuse to use it on that grounds, no matter how many experts will tell them the other one is better, more secure etc.

Also, I'll mention it again: if you set ddg or anything else as selected search engine in FF Nightly, typing in the location bar will still search with Google. To change that, you need to mess with about:config. Justification? Money, I suppose...

Yes, that is true. Another example. I have seen so many people who installed Firefox and never changed the 'by default Mozilla version of Google' to the real start page of Google (where they could see the different Google Doodles and have more search options to click on directly), when they open the browser.

Well in fact, I think the name has a ring to it. The logo too complements it well.

I guess what's not working for DDG is that it's a me-too product. It boils down to this: What does DDG have that Google doesn't?.

Me-too products can perform reasonably well if they are launched by corps with deep pockets for obvious reasons(like G+). Otherwise, a company like DDG has to have something different and unique to offer.

Oh, btw, that privacy hullabaloo works only for a very small percentage of the users. Most don't care or ignore.

DDG doesn't track you[0] or put you in a filter bubble[1]. They also have the bang syntax[2] for searching other sites/engines.

0: http://donttrack.us/

1: http://dontbubble.us/

2: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

Does the mainstream audience care about all that?

They do if it gives them what they perceive to be better results. (Specifically the lack of filter bubble)

Does everything have to be about mainstream audience? I don't know if DDG's goal is to take over Google's market share, but I can say that, as a (wannabe) hacker, I've been using it as my default search engine for the past year or so.

What seduced me was the reasons stated by my grandparent comment (and the fact that good ol' Google search is a "!g" away).

Not everything has to please the mainstream. Discussing whether DuckDuckGo is a good name is one thing. But to questions the features of the engine on account that it's not "mainstream" misses the point. I think.

As a matter of fact, not everything has to be about mainstream audience, it depends on the product.

http://scholar.google.co.in is not meant to be a mainstream product.

Where as http://google.com/search is a mainstream product. And DDG thinks itself as Google's competitor with a heart for privacy, that's their USP.

So yes, as far as DDG is concerned, mainstream matters. It's a generic search engine, not a vertical for scholars or the like.

Agreed. But my reply will be a classic "try explaining that to my mum".

I agree that the benefits are not well understood to those outside of the tech world and to them DDG is definitely a me-too site.

I don't think these reasons are so strong. If you're not signed into Google, you don't need to worry about tracking. And you can turn off personalized results: https://www.google.com/preferences. The Bang sytax is usually worse than doing a Google site search, since Google usually does a better job ranking a site's content than the website itself.

I would bet money that Google "anonymously" tracks you regardless of whether you're logged in or not. And by anonymous, that's only until someone data mines the dozens of searches you do per day.

Turning off personalized results doesn't stop Google from tracking you, it just stops leveraging that tracking for your benefit.

And I misspoke about the bang syntax: it actually runs a search on the target website. If you search for "foobar !g" on DDG, it redirects you to this page: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foobar. Same as "kitten video !yt" redirs to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kitten%20video.

edit: I misread your comment about goog's site search indexing vs a site's native search. That is entirely site dependent. And it's still only a "kitten videos site:youtube.com !g" away in DDG.

Did you notice that you keep abreviating their name? DuckDuckGo is just not something you want to type in, and that will stop people going there.

Bingo! name needs a pivot

Or, google could have tried to not be evil and redirect duck.com to DDG instead of google when they bought it to prevent Gabriel from getting it.

Silly or not, it's the only search engine name other than google or bing that sticks in my head as being memorable. Probably because it is silly and different.

I guess my only complaint would be that it feels long to type because it is three words. (Even though the are short words.)

I have spend some time researching good names for products and startups (see here http://www.quora.com/What-are-good-company-and-startup-names).

Good names are effective and accomplish a goal:

1: describe the offer: who you are - does the user get a sense what you offer? 2: or explain your mission: what you want to be, or how you want to achieve that 3: inspire to action 4: celebrate the benefit, the relevance, why you matter to consumers 5: describe the user 6: easy to spell and pronounce 7: trigger an emotion related to your mission 8: simple and sticky

DuckDuckGo is at least sticky and it triggers an emotion in my case. DuckDuckGo is not a perfect name, such as: "ChatRoulette", "YouTube", "BurgerKing", "PatientsLikeMe", "TripAdvisor", "OpenTable", "YourMechanic", "RackSpace", "Codecademy", "SoundCloud".

But I had never the problem to remember the name, DuckDuckGo. It is whacky, but is cool. Their logo is stylish. I like DuckDuckGo.

Blekko is a much shorter name. If you don't know, yes Blekko is a search engine. Go check them out. But I have the feeling more people start to use DuckDuckGo therefore either the quality is that good, or they like the brand, despite the very long domain.

They could buy the domain MegaSearch.com before Dotcom does it :) But that would be a lame name.

No, they should just stick with the name DuckDuckGo and try to become the default search engine for Firefox and other browsers, so people don't even have to type in their long domain name to search with them.

I cannot agree more!

The name of the search engine has been called "silly" by Frederic Lardinois of Read Write Web. Weinberg said of the origin of the name, "Really it just popped in my head one day and I just liked it. It is certainly influenced/derived from [the game] duck duck goose, but other than that there is no relation, e.g., a metaphor."

Looks like no research was done regarding the name. Naming services very well (or very unique) can really help your company stand out. I like DDG but perhaps a study with regards to the name and the brand might be in order.

You still called it DDG. Even DDG kinda adds authenticity and some authority.

It could be D^2G or D*2G or D2G

Seems unnecessary if it can simply be DDG, a true acronym for the same or less characters than your suggestion.

Yes, I find it's too long. I type all day and take shortcuts wherever I can. We all do; TL;DR, HN, if DDG it taken let them claim DDGO!

That doesn't even mean anything. The only reason DDG is an acronym is because it's easier to type. It sure isn't due to any marketing/branding effort on DDG's part, because ddg.com is an iOS app studio. Frankly I think DDG would be a better brand, not unlike other acronym bnrands like IBM or HP, but brands need to be built, not wished for.

It's not all about the focus groups, dude. This sort of thinking is ruining politics and business.

Yahoo, and Google are also silly names. While we are at it, there is a company calling itself 'Apple'... and no, it is not a fruit company! They'd all do much better changing names to something more boring.

I was actually thinking about this just the other day. I think that they have a pretty interesting product, but I just can't take them seriously. Hell, even Quack would be a better name...

Quack.io is available (duckduck.io is too)

.io is not a serious TLD - it is for tech products, not the general public

You have to have a .com if you want to compete with Google.

    it is for tech products, not the general public

It is for the British Indian Ocean Territory. Any other use is a domain hack. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io

You are, of course, correct.

With the prevalence of other TLDs, I wonder if that's really true these days. Gut instinct says you're probably right, but what makes one TLD more serious than another? Just its de facto position in public perception, or maybe its age?

Interesting notion, especially since .com is incredibly crowded.

Non-technical users don't understand GTLDs. Ask an audience of 100 nontechnical people to record themselves visiting color.io or any other .io domain. I would be willing to wager at a minimum 50% will type color.io.com.

One very underrated quality of names is how easy they are to say.

What some would call the 'radio test'.

1. Must be a dot com.

2. Must clearly state & define the product or service being sold.

3. Must be easy to pronounce & therefore pass the radio test.

4. Must not be longer than necessary, the shorter the better.

5. Must be about a product or service that is in demand & being searched for.

6. Must be easy to remember, in fact it must be a no brainer to remember.

7. Must be a domain a business could be built on.

source: http://www.ricksblog.com/my_weblog/2012/11/ringscom-roofscom...

That excludes all available .com domains.

It's funny, Google stuck and when I first heard it in college I thought it sounded silly. However, I agree. Google is easier to type on the keyboard while duckduckgo is not quite seamless. Maybe change it? Or find some sort of abbreviation?

does it really matter? nearly every browser allows you to add custom search engines, and change the default one. if you set duckduckgo as the default search engine, you don't ever have to type in duckduckgo - you can just use your address field.

Why don't you name your startup "asdjflasjflaksdjfa" and see if it survives. Bet you it doesn't.

That's a false comparison. It's not just that asdjflas... takes a long time to type, but it's also really hard to remember.

DuckDuckGo is probably easier to remember than most names. It just happens to take a little longer to type than Google or Apple. The Awesome Bar and Omni Bar make it less of an issue, though.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is pretty easy to remember.

Only how to pronounce it. I couldn't spell it to save my life.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is only easy to remember because you already have a reason to remember it (ie a strong brand, Disney, has already pushed it into your memory).

If it didn't have a movie behind it, you'd say, "Super-what?"

use http://ddg.gg

Google stuck and when I first heard it in college I thought it sounded silly.

But the word 'googol' (1 x 10^100) is familiar to most geeks and suggests the service involves very large numbers, which is the sort of thing you'd expect of a search engine. So the name makes sense to the techie demographic that are likely to be opinion leaders for their non-technical friends. IIRC Google didn't spend any money on marketing for the first few years, and when it did advertise at first it was only for recruiting staff.

I don't find duckduckgo hard to type, it just makes me think of Angry Birds-type casual gaming.

I don't use it because it's Bing under the hood.

Otherwise I would, name and all.

I thought the guy wrote his own crawler?

It's both:

http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...

At least its not called searchfy or searchly. Sure, its freakishly long, but I love that damn duck. Same with Blekko. Ugly name, highly useful. Will they ever replace Google? I don't know. Hopefully Nuuton will... :)

I agree they should re-brand. Duck.com would have been good. The day I saw duck.com redirected to Google I thought DuckDuckGo missed a great opportunity. That's where you see how savvy Google are.

They claim they tried to and were unable to. On2 had the domain and google acquired it when they bought the company.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/22/net-us-google-duck...

Yes, but how much did they offer for Duck.com? Duck.com being now with Google, they should just rebrand to something else. Forget the duck. Go with something else. PunchBowl.com or whatever brandable name.

My non-tech savvy friends think it is some sort of a joke.

When someone comes to you with a problem, it's way funnier to tell them to "duckduckgo-it" and then look at their startled face. :)

The biggest help for me to switch would be for DDG to produce a fork of Chrome that plugged DDG into the Chrome Omnibox as much as possible.

I use the Omnibox for almost 100% of my interaction with the browser, mostly typing in URLs to visit and accessing search history, all integrated with searching as I type.

If I could use the Omnibox like that with search as I type on DDG instead, that'd be excellent.

You don't even need to use a fork, regular 'ol Chrome'll do the job for you.

Go into the settings page, find the `Search` section, and hit manage search engines. Than choose DDG (provided DDG has been used by you before).

My biggest problem with DDG is that it is so English-centric. I know they have those "regions", but the results from them are much worse than from US region and a need to switch them via settings page every time I change the search language is an unacceptable hassle.

You can type "r:xx" in your query to set the region, in any case. (e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bonjour+r%3Afr )

I do, like, 40% of searches in my language, so it is still a lot of work. Anyway, language recognition is actually pretty easy nowadays, especially with the amount of data DDG has from crawling -- if they care about foreigners of course.

Not just the name, they need to improve the search too. Example, searching for xxx gives london2012.com as the first result. I cannot understand why.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=xxx

It is Roman Numerals for 30 as the 2012 Olympics was the 30th Olympiad.

Google chose a name which can be used like a verb, which I think was a very clever move.

Just duck it.

I dont want my boss see me using duckduckgo. He would ask me what the fuck i'm doing.

Then get a better boss.

^ Must work for Google

Silly names stand out and grab attention. In the crowded marketplace they operate in that's just what they need rather than a cool name like Cuil, or an unforgettable generic name like ... oh shit, I can't think of one.

NextSearch

It's a great name. Unforgettable. Imaginative. Search provides excellent results.

Keep in mind, it's possible that Gabriel Weinberg is making enough money off of DuckDuckGo already and isn't looking to swing for the fences with this particular project.

DuckDuckGo -> ddgo ->gdgo ->golgo ->goglo ->googl -> googl(e)

Isn't it more than a name?

Golgo 13?

I'm surprised to see so much complaining about the length of the name. Do you guys not have auto-complete?

duck.com redirects to google.com

So apparently DDG tried to buy duck.com but got outbid -- Google ended up buying the company that owned the domain. Apparently just to get it away from Gabe...

That's one of the reasons Google's getting investigated for anti-trust stuff.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-google-duck...

Oh for heaven's sake. Duck corporation became On2 following a merger in 1999, and had ass-kicking video codec technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On2_Technologies

Yes. It's ugly, faux-cutesy and it doesn't tell me anything about the service.

agree. too long to type.

They have http://ddg.gg

I'm actually a fan of the name, it's unique. Might sound like a joke until you know that it's not. And it only takes too long to type the first time, auto complete takes care of it for the rest of your life. Here's how it looks for me: <ctrl-t>, d, u, <enter>. Takes no longer than a second

Well, it could be much easier, if its your default search engine. All I do is, <ctrl-t>, <my query>, <enter>. They have pretty cool search syntax too.

Hashbangs are definitely awesome.

Try ddg.gg

You think they ducked up when they chose it?

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