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I wonder, is DuckDuckGo's name a problem for adoption? I have no idea what it's supposed to mean, but it sounds very silly and I don't much enjoy recommending

I wonder, is DuckDuckGo's name a problem for adoption? I have no idea what it's supposed to mean, but it sounds very silly and I don't much enjoy recommending it to people in real life, at least in part for that reason. ("Google" was a silly name too, but at least it was just one syllable of silliness.) Privacy is probably slowly growing into a big deal in the minds of regular people, but when the incumbent works, and works better (in my experience Google does just return better results than DDG - and I really did give it a try, in earnest, for a solid week a few months back...), privacy alone isn't going to be enough at this point.

jaredsohn 10y ago
>I have no idea what it's supposed to mean I've understood it to be a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose; the wikipedia article on duckduckgo confirms.
- bshimmin 10y ago
  Is this an American thing? I have never heard of it.
  - cassowary 10y ago
    I played Duck Duck Goose when I was a kid in Australia.
    - gregjw 10y ago
      I played Duck Duck Goose when I was a kid in the United Kingdom.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Yeah like you pointed out, if your product stands out so much that nothing else matters, then you can name it whatever you want. But duckduckgo is just a glorified meta search engine and they are not doing anything completely unique. In this case branding matters and I think their name is really bad for branding. There are many examples of really bad naming, like cockroachdb and swagger. Swagger ended up changing their name to OpenAPI (Thank god) but I don't know what the cockroachdb guys are thinking. I don't want to use a DB named after a bug (pun intended).
corobo 10y ago
> I wonder, is DuckDuckGo's name a problem for adoption For me it is too, yeah. They even own duck.co which would be a better brand. It'd be a pain in the arse to tell others to use to start ("duck dot com?" "no, dot co") but nowhere near as silly sounding as duck duck go.
flukus 10y ago
> Privacy is probably slowly growing into a big deal in the minds of regular people, but when the incumbent works, and works better (in my experience Google does just return better results than DDG - and I really did give it a try, in earnest, for a solid week a few months back...), privacy alone isn't going to be enough at this point. I've had the opposite experience lately, DDG has been almost identical to the google results, to the point where the seem to be calibrating there own searches with google. Unfortunately it means it also suffers the same problems.

jaredsohn 10y ago

>I have no idea what it's supposed to mean I've understood it to be a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose; the wikipedia article on duckduckgo confirms.

bshimmin 10y ago
Is this an American thing? I have never heard of it.
- cassowary 10y ago
  I played Duck Duck Goose when I was a kid in Australia.
  - gregjw 10y ago
    I played Duck Duck Goose when I was a kid in the United Kingdom.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

Yeah like you pointed out, if your product stands out so much that nothing else matters, then you can name it whatever you want. But duckduckgo is just a glorified meta search engine and they are not doing anything completely unique. In this case branding matters and I think their name is really bad for branding. There are many examples of really bad naming, like cockroachdb and swagger. Swagger ended up changing their name to OpenAPI (Thank god) but I don't know what the cockroachdb guys are thinking. I don't want to use a DB named after a bug (pun intended).

corobo 10y ago

> I wonder, is DuckDuckGo's name a problem for adoption For me it is too, yeah. They even own duck.co which would be a better brand. It'd be a pain in the arse to tell others to use to start ("duck dot com?" "no, dot co") but nowhere near as silly sounding as duck duck go.

flukus 10y ago

> Privacy is probably slowly growing into a big deal in the minds of regular people, but when the incumbent works, and works better (in my experience Google does just return better results than DDG - and I really did give it a try, in earnest, for a solid week a few months back...), privacy alone isn't going to be enough at this point. I've had the opposite experience lately, DDG has been almost identical to the google results, to the point where the seem to be calibrating there own searches with google. Unfortunately it means it also suffers the same problems.