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"Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not to emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo)." Why would this guy g
by laser 9y ago
"Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not to emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo)."
Why would this guy go out of his way to say this metaphor is actually literally informative and generous towards DuckDuckGo while apparently having exerted no mental effort and being incorrect by orders of magnitude on his own data?
If you're most generous to the writer, you get 12 million hits /day vs 13 billion hits /day according to his data from Wolfram, for a ratio of ~1/1100, which applied to a pygmy elephant of 5500 lbs yields a corresponding weight of ~5 lbs for the mosquito, or over 2,000,000 mg, versus the average mosquito weight of about 5 mg. Even if he meant a small 2000 kilogram pygmy elephant and a 20mg elephant mosquito, he's still 5 orders of magnitude too generous towards Google in mass comparison in his metaphor in which he is "actually making things better for DuckDuckGo".
I think most people think of animals like African Elephants when they hear "elephant", though, in which case you're looking at a 13,000 pound animal versus a ~12 pound one if you use hits as your metric, or a ~95 lb one if you go by visits as your metric.
So an actually fair metaphor is if Google's an elephant, DuckDuckGo is somewhere between a goose and a hyena. Better watch out, Google.
- jerrre 9y agoNice exercise, but in length I would say the magnitude is correct: around 6m for an elephant vs 3-6mm for a mosquito
- amelius 9y agoBut animals are three-dimensional, so it's better to include three dimensions in the comparison. We also compare CPUs by die-area, not by their length or height.
- daurnimator 9y agoIt's pretty common to compare animals by height. e.g. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Largestdinosaursbysuborder_scale.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Largestd...
- tryingagainbro 9y ago>>Better watch out, Google. Yeah, be really scared MSFT, two geeks from Stanford that wanted to sell for $800k are going to challenge you in the future. A little (long-overdue) help from anti-trust authorities and Google might just have to watch out. After a while migration to another SE is logarithmic. https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html Google pays for a lot of its traffic, see Traffic Acquisition Costs, directly and indirectly.
- daurnimator 9y agoMaybe he was using a scale other than weight/volume? Though looking at size, an african elephant is 4m tall, while a small mosquito is 2mm. this is a ratio of 2000:1.
- csallen 9y agoExactly. Most people, when thinking about the relative size of animals, evaluate the 2-dimensional area of those animals. We certainly don't tend to consider mass, weight, or even volume. So the metaphor as originally given (mosquito vs elephant) works well.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sandov 9y ago>this is a ratio of 2000:1. In which case he would actually have been generous to DuckDuckGo while not being wrong by orders of magnitude. Conclusion: OP meant linear size, not mass. He could have stated it explicitly though, because one would naturally think that he was referring to mass.
- viridian 9y agoThis actually isn't true. Based on the numbers we have, and have been posted in this thread this is unfair to DDG by a factor of almost 2.
- BerislavLopac 9y agoSo a... duck? ;-)
- sundvor 9y agoBravo. :)
- chrisweekly 9y ago2 ducks
- TFortunato 9y agoUgh. GO. :-P
- noxToken 9y agoI did a quick search comparing the mass of a mallard to a Canadian goose (default options returned for 'weight of duck' and 'weight of goose'). A large mallard on avg is about 3.5 lbs, and a small Canadian goose on average is about 7.1 lbs. In this case, yes! Two ducks == 1 goose.
- djsumdog 9y agoShe's a witch, burn her!
- chiefalchemist 9y agoBest. Comment. Ever.
- swasheck 9y agoYou beat me. I was coming with "and very small rocks."
- ptero 9y agoYes!! Maybe a "development stages" chart would go well with this meme: an egg (2015?) to a duck (2017) to a something_big (2019?).
- 9y ago
- kowdermeister 9y agoBy hit counts, maybe, what about financially? What about employee count?
- StavrosK 9y agoDo you care if one company has two employees and one has a million to produce the exact same end result?
- kowdermeister 9y ago> exact same end result Not really, but "exact same end result" is far from the current situation. And I'm not saying they shouldn't do it, rather that they really need to catch up. Google (not counting other Alphabet companies) does a lots of things. I think the original analogy is mostly right.
- StavrosK 9y ago> "exact same end result" is far from the current situation My point can be rephrased as "given that the result is the same, do employee counts matter"? If not, then they don't matter in general.
- smt88 9y agoIn this case, employee count is very relevant. It might tell us how realistic scaling to the size of Google is, for example. I don't think it does, but it's an interest thought: could DDG manage Google's search traffic with ~1,000 employees (scaling linearly)? Could it do the same with fewer than that?
- dx034 9y agoA very small part of Google employees actually work on search. If google were to sell everything but the search division, they'd be a small company. The ad business and infrastructure are used by search but not the product.
- 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Acalyptol 9y agoI think this analogy is misleading as we tend to visualize animals by size and not by weight.
- FabHK 9y agoAnd by size, do you mean volume or height?
- alexasmyths 9y agoThat was one of the most HN comments I've ever read. Hey, it's just a metaphor. Scales and ratios not needed. edit: Wasn't meant to be negative ... as I could see myself writing something like that and my GF giggling at me for a week ...
- smt88 9y agoThe author went out of his way to say that the scale of the metaphor was wrong. I don't find it that pedantic for someone to point out that the opposite is true, especially when it makes a huge difference to the reader understanding the scale of DuckDuckGo's accomplishments.
- badosu 9y agoI agree with parent, it's not just a metaphor but a wildly inaccurate guess that makes the reader think duckduckgo is more irrelevant than it really is. > That was one of the most HN comments I've ever read. What does this mean?
- Uehreka 9y agoHN has a reputation among some[who?][weasel words] as a place where many commenters are some combination of pedantic, overly literal and out of touch with mainstream culture. Taking this metaphor to pieces would seem to check the first 2 boxes pretty neatly.
- graphitezepp 9y agoYup. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
- BartSaM 9y agoYou actually make it sound bad. I would more likely to say they are precise and usually won't allow for inaccurate information to fly through the front page without pointing out the issues.
- 9y ago
- n0us 9y agoif you like this, /r/theydidthemath is a great subreddit to check out in your spare time
- otakucode 9y agoPerhaps rather than thinking in terms of material mass, he was thinking in terms of subjective conceptual 'weight' of each in the minds of his audience. Mosquitos are annoying and can be quite dangerous due to carrying parasites and pathogens, so the 'weight' we give them in the messy associative matrix of our brains is far larger than their raw mass. In other words: maybe he didn't mean it precisely.
- neals 9y agoMight I suggest using the bounding-box of both specimen to try to make the equation work?
- tda 9y agoI would prefer spherical elephants and mosquitos
- sp4ke 9y agoOr to put it in Edward Tuft's "Lie Factor" terms using a 5000 lbs elephant and 5mg mosquito I get a lie factor of 454046 (if someone can check out the math).
- grwthckrmstr 9y ago*starts slow clapping....with increasing intensity" Video if you're unable to visualise - https://youtu.be/o0u4M6vppCI?t=2m42s https://youtu.be/o0u4M6vppCI?t=2m42s
- karussell 9y agoGreat analysis. Still I see two problems. First, the company name Google comes from "Googol" and so it cannot be overestimated and second, why are you mixing lbs and kilogram in your analysis!? And using lbs is in general uglier than the wrong metaphor ;)
- return0 9y agothanks for doing the calculations. it was obviously an off comment
- projectant 9y agoI find it funny that engineers ( on HN ? ) put on their I'm-a-rigid-logic-thinking-only-engineer cap when it suits them, and their I'm-an-imaginative-open-eyed-creative-rebel cap when it suits them as well. Traits of the first cap include: can't think outside the exact parameters given them, can't 'fill in the blanks' or inference laterally, take words and numbers to be exact limiting things. Traits of the second cap are basically the opposite of these, we can fill in the blanks, and so on. I don't notice people wearing both hats at the same time much. Of course, the OP could be satire. When you can't tell the difference between satire and your platform, then ... Incidentally, if we look sideways a bit the metaphor fits like: Google isn't just linearly bigger, it has nonlinear increases in advantages because of its size, clout, network effects, and so on. So the order of magnitude discrepancy is perhaps justified by attempting to account for these affects. Conversely, it could be suggesting that smaller disruptive and startups ought to spread their influence virally, parasitically, or through insect-like nimbleness and hatching-of-the-1000-eggs reproduction, instead of relying on slower, more "mammalian" reproduction to propagate their influence. Who knows? Hard to say which interpretation is correct, when words are ambiguous and one leaves it to the imagination. You can't even rely on Occam's razor to decide, since the shortest path between two thoughts differs depending on the mind. But maybe that's not a bad thing. Speech & language is nothing more than successful miscommunication. You can't police what you don't understand.
- nothrabannosir 9y agoMaybe he didn't mean the metaphor was the problem, but the sentence following it (about making things look better for ddg)? Depending on interpretation, that could be undue discredit to ddg... That would make this a bit of an ironic comment, no? :p
- AdamSC1 9y agoIf you'd like to go by searches rather than visits: At DuckDuckGo we are averaging roughly 17 million searches a day right now (duckduckgo.com/traffic.html) Google says they did 2 trillion searches last year[1], and while usually their search metrics include Youtube, Google Maps and Gmail queries let's assume it was all searches. That'd be roughly 5.5 billion searches a day. So now we're talking ~1/322 or just shy of 40lbs. That's roughly the size of a Hamadryas baboon or about 22 Mallard ducks - not a bad little flock! :) Disclaimer: DDG staff. Opinions are my own. No animals were harmed in the poor construction of this analogy. [1]http://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trillion-searches-per-year-250247 http://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trillio...
- puzzle 9y agoSince when search metrics include YT, Maps and... Gmail?!? Unless you're talking about universal search results, I've never seen the numbers for all those products conflated.
- AdamSC1 9y agoIf you look at the most recently public posted qSearch report on Feb 2016[2] you'll notice it talks about "Explicit Core Search" and "Powered By Reporting." Powered By Reporting is listed as any search that is handled by Google or Bing. "Google’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at "Google entities", as well as searches on AOL and Ask’s MyWebSearch "[3] In Comscores qSearch product that you can subscribe to, when you hit "Google Sites" it provides a drop down detailing the breakdown of all the properties. Search is hard to define when companies get to that size, and searches on other Google properties are indeed 'searches' but they are also different than searches on DuckDuckGo. [2]http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases-February-2016-US-Desktop-Search-Engine-Rankings http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases-... [3]http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/comScore-September-2010-qSearch-Reporting-Enhancements http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/comScore-September-201...
- puzzle 9y ago
- akuji1993 9y agoI know you kind of overdid it a bit, but that's exactly the kind of stuff that distracts me for an hour, because I have to do the same math you did. Nicely done and good to see that DuckDuckGo is already a hyena, rather than a mosquito.
- conjectures 9y agoNice point, but the real question is: are we talking about an unladen goose? ;)