I personally am a fan of DDG and use it as my primary search engine. I do wish they'd change their name as it makes it difficult to recommend to non-technical people.
I have found it easy to recommend to non-technical people. (In the early days of Google, I had to spell it for people too... at least this is 3 common words.)
I think the emphasis on converting non-technical people is also often misplaced. Non-technical people don't care about any of the issues that lead to development. The number of people using Skype shows most people don't care about privacy. That doesn't mean DDG's offering is not unique or valuable, it's just that the people to recognize that value will not be the majority by any stretch - but, it never is - and converting people who have the hardest time understanding that value should be a low priority IMHO.
In promoting privacy, DDG captures the union of early adopters, technically literate, and digital evangelists - all groups that are most likely to understand as well as turn around and effectively promote it (for example, by setting the homepage and default search engine after cleaning up a system for a friend)... This is the crowd to keep happy (without raising the barrier to entry either... for example, late adopters will not use bangs or care that you search Hacker News too, but the early adopters appreciate it greatly). These were the same types of people promoting the early Internet to the masses, who barely saw the point in having a computer.
In that vein, one of the best things for DDG, IMHO, would be to make setting ALL browsers as easy as possible (homepage+default search). (I know I'm not saying anything new...) There are add-ons for individual browsers, for example (which I tend not to use, because I like vanilla installations without extensions to upgrade later), and conventional methods (which I prefer, but have been de-emphasized in favor of add-ons), but further-centralizing the process of applying these customizations would be nice. For example, I'd rather download a single native app or portable script (WSH) that was capable of searching out browsers and - through check-boxes - setting their homepage and search (ideally to the SSL search), via the browser-native method (or add-on method), in one pass (usable offline, and ideally at an easy-to-type URL like "duckduckgo.com/tools"). This would help high-turn-over scenarios like tech-support shops, which has the chance to affect the most users but are also under pressure, so want to do the minimum possible (Idea: actively promote to these places).
On a different note, I'm curious how the costs associated with this XMPP service are expected to grow and how it is seen from the business side. If 100000 people started to use it for messaging, would it become too burdensome and be discontinued, or is there a plan for cost-recovery (or is the ddg bot enough of a case)?
I can't imagine ever saying "I DuckDuckGoed it" - since that breaks the verb 'to go'.
Although I've conditioned myself over several years to say "I searched for it [on DuckDuckGo]", I sometimes still find myself saying "I Googled it".
Idea: "I duckduck GOT it!"
I ducked-it.
Has a nice ring to it.
[1] Hotbotted? AltaVista'd? Lycos'd? Yahoo'd? Asked Jeeves? Did any normals ever say any of those things?
[2] "Tweet" is as close as any other service has come to google-style verbing of their brand by the general public. And that's only the case when you stretch the definition of 'general public'.
All become common English words, many of them in the dictionary but started as brands.
There are plenty more if you go back to the 19th century (eg. Heroin)
edit: Wikipedia has a list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized...
If "Googled" goes the way of "Xeroxed" then the potential value of "DuckDuckGo-ed" is as irrelevant as "Ricoh-ed".
Even before the internet, verbing was happening. Hoover is a brand of vacuum and people say "hoovered" / "hoovering".
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=test
compare to
http://www.yandex.com/yandsearch?text=test&lr=20996 http://www.bing.com/search?q=test&go=&qs=bs&form...
Shows that the results appear to be coming from Yandex not Bing, which is what DDG says on the page.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+much+wood+could+a+woodchuck
Appears to be sourced from Bing, but to say its just Bing is incorrect.
Also the top zero click info is sourced from all over the place (I should know as I provide some of them).
I've been using Conformal's Xombrero browser for some time now, and on first run Xombrero offers a choice of search engines, my choice being https://duckduckgo.com/lite
Perhaps DuckDuckGo could acquire a ddg.* domain to make it easier to access?
For any media coverage about Lady Gaga, you are more likely to see column inches dedicated to deriding her appearance than you are to discussing her music.
When the Occupy protests were at their height, there were so many comments along the lines of "They may have a valid point, but no-one is going to listen to them if they dress like that"
All too often I see comments criticizing appearance as being something that indicates their value to be less. frequently it comes in the form of "I know it has value, but you should change the appearance so others can see".
I think this is counter-productive. Appearing business-like may make more people believe you are business-actual, but it also reinforces the attitude that means people judge the business-like as business-actual. It may be good for you but bad for the world. Those who wear the right suits and walk the right walk but cannot actually do the right work can deceive a lot of people.
I think pushing back against this attitude is a worthy endeavour.
- Neil Graham, Screaming Duck Software.Thanks for using DDG!
Thanks for what you've done with DDG. Privacy is a difficult sell when everyone else is offering "free" services in return for it.
Is there any chance that you could create another brand with a name that I could get non-tech people to use? It could be exactly the same everything except the name. The number of times I've convinced someone to switch until they hear the name...
No immediate plans to change the name or branding, but duly noted! We really do appreciate and consider all feedback.
I want to like DDG and I've switched to it from time to time, but the thing that always gets me is that I loathe the branding. I'm really, really sorry, about that and I appreciate what you're doing with DDG, and wish the branding didn't turn me off to a peculiar degree, but Google is such an easy choice and it doesn't get on my nerves.
I know that I'm an outlier in this, but I don't think it's altogether a completely impossible or uncommon reaction to be turned off by the name.
Thinking about it, the reason UK people don't like it might be to do with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop
I imagine it's easier to soften the Ks with an american accent. For an english person putting two of them in a row like that is just, shall we say, taking the piss.
Perhaps it's not specifically the glottal stop, but there is certainly some articulatory havoc going on when I try to say your search engine's name out loud. I have to bounce my tongue off the roof of my mouth twice in quick succession in a way that's never normally required and it feels quite unnatural.
(Google, on the other hand, is literally fun to say, even though it's a silly word, and hardly professional.)
The name alone puts me off to a large degree, although the way it seems to go out its way to say "we're not google" puts me off too. Overall I just don't like the way they advertise, I don't feel like it should be appealing to the sort of person I am.
I know it's shallow to judge a product/service by its name, but for most people hearing the name for the first time counts as an initial encounter with the product/service, and since that can leave an impression, it matters a lot.
They should really just rename it to Duck Duck Gray Duck.
Non-technical people I tell the name to remember it more for the "controversy".
But then, I always say "teach the controversy" :)
Thanks for the link. I've been wanting a shorter domain name for duckducgo ever since I first began using it.
I noticed this morning that http://lmddgtfy.net/ now takes you to the developer's blog page instead of to duckduckgo.
Many thanks for the share!
A serious product, made by serious people, focuses on serious issue (privacy) shall look like one.