Hacker News Reader

Comment by ronaldx | Hacker News Reader

I like the name, but one barrier is that DuckDuckGo doesn't verb comfortably.

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".

View on HN

The actual English "I searched for it" abstracts the implementation allowing you to switch out the underlying engine without replacing your verbal communication interface.

This, of course, is not as favorable for viral marketing.

"I googled it" didn't make a lot of sense for the first 5 years either... I tend to say "duckduckgo it" or "ask the duck" when referring to duckduckgo. It's hard to capture that last 5% of linguistic serendipity, so I'm not sure how it could be any better without sacrificing its identifying uniqueness.

Idea: "I duckduck GOT it!"

Asked the duck. Nice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Duck-It.

I ducked-it.

Has a nice ring to it.

I don't understand the fascination with Google competitors needing to have an easily "verb"ed brand. People never felt the need to verb their search engines before Google. [1] Nor do they now feel the need to verb any other search engine, host, portal, network or huge site like imdb, facebook, wikipedia or amazon. [2]

[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'.

Yahoo'd is an actual term I have heard people use. So the verbing is there with that one!

facebooked is also a frequent use

There's "photoshopped". In fact it's often shortened to just "shopped".

Even before the internet, verbing was happening. Hoover is a brand of vacuum and people say "hoovered" / "hoovering".

Xerox, Post-it, Frisbee, Roller Blades, Q-tips, White Out, Windex, Viagra, Aspirin, Escalator, Zip-loc, Scotch tape, Polaroid, Jacuzzi, Walkman, Velcro, Super glue

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...

You seem to be agreeing with me.

If "Googled" goes the way of "Xeroxed" then the potential value of "DuckDuckGo-ed" is as irrelevant as "Ricoh-ed".

Shouldn't you say you Bing'd it since DDG use Bing for the actual search.

That's not strictly true.

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 ducked it.

Hard to say "duck it" slightly flippantly in conversation without the risk of being more offensive than intended. ;)

I duckduckwent there.

I ducked halle berry

I DuckDuckWent it?

I usually say "I googled it on ddg".

I would drop the double duck and just say "duck go it".

I've been saying 'DDG it' around the house.

This is what I and my tech colleagues say.

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?

Such as ddg.gg?

Was not aware of /lite. Love it!

as mentioned, ddg.gg is active.

/me duckduckgoes!

duck typed it?

ddg'd it (dee, dee, gee'd)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com