4 ms·

Google owns duck.com and points it directly at Google search

50 points by davidbarker 8y ago

DannyBee 8y ago
As fun as this crazy conspiracy theory is, this is because Google acquired The Duck Corporation (which is what On2 used to be called), which owned duck.com. They basically predate DDG. (they were acquired in 2009, ddg was started late 2008)
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  And it should be noted that the On2 acquisition happened at almost the exact time as the creation of duckduckgo, so it's unlikely DDG was even on the radar of anyone in google at that time.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  The difference seems to be that on2.com has an appropriate landing page: https://twitter.com/Richiesque/status/1019973138417938432 https://twitter.com/Richiesque/status/1019973138417938432 Whereas duck.com, a commonly interesting domain name for their competitor (which DDG claims confuses a lot of their users), gets redirected to Google's search engine with no other note whatsoever. Shouldn't duck.com have a similar page to on2.com?
  - btian 8y ago
    What about Pulse.io? It also redirects to google.com I believe most of Google's acquisitions redirect to the search engine (unless there's a more appropriate destination).
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      I know meebo.com is another acquisition that leads to a landing page rather than a redirect to Google.com. My guess is who puts what on what server and whether or not it's a redirect depends heavily on who is involved in the post-acquisition work, since Google is a big company. I'm not discounting the possibility that it's innocuous, but it's strange that even among the same acquisition, one domain goes to google.com and one goes to a landing page explaining the acquisition. EDIT note: DannyBee's opinion here was posted around the same time as this comment, and suggests a specific corporate strategy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570412
  - turc1656 8y ago
    Yes, yes it should. At least that's what I would expect if they were going for transparency. The only thing that would make sense is if On2 (previously known as Duck Corproration) was actually involved in internet search. It was not, ever. So this seems like a clear attempt to drive traffic to me. Both domains were part of the same acquisition. Why put that landing page on On2 but not Duck? The answer is obvious.
  - DannyBee 8y ago
    No. Actually, for as long as i've been involved in helping M&A at Google, they have typically turned them down by keeping some regular company page working, and redirecting all the other domains to Google.com homepage. IE what they did here. There are a few cases i can think of where the domain no longer exists, it depended on a lot of things. But basically all "plans" i read was to do the above. At one point early in my google career, i believe pretty much all domains google owned but was not using redirected to google.com. I don't believe this is done any longer in general because people were using it to guess at what Google was doing :)
- amanzi 8y ago
  That explains why they own the domain name but doesn't explain why they are using it to redirect to their search engine instead of the on2 landing page: http://www.on2.com/ http://www.on2.com/
  - rasz 8y ago
    and they kept the same "it has been acquired blabla" page for a year on duck.com https://web.archive.org/web/20101002183258/http://duck.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101002183258/http://duck.com:8...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
thaumaturgy 8y ago
According to the internet archive, it started redirecting between November 2 and December 3 of 2010. After mining a bit of HN history, DDG was already up and running and seeing some use by then (ex. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334720). The issue of the duck.com domain came up back in 2012: > He also said his company had tried to buy the duck.com domain from its previous owner, On2 Technologies, but was rejected. Google eventually acquired the domain when it bought the entire company, and redirects duck.com traffic to Google.com. > "It only started redirecting after we inquired about (buying the domain name)," said Weinberg. "It causes confusion." http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-21/business/sns-rt-us-google-duckduckgobre8al00i-20121121_1_instant-search-feature-google-s-chrome-search-engine http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-21/business/sns-r... (with some wonderfully vitriolic best-of-HN comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817466 -- including a reply from ~yegg explaining his position about this.) edit: Neat, I was able to find DDG's debut on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 That was on September 25, 2008. Google's offer to On2 was in August of 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On2_Technologies#Acquisition_by_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On2_Technologies#Acquisition_b...) (the actual acquisition came later, after Google increased its offer). To be clear, I'm not convinced Google bought On2 just to screw with DDG. But the timeline is not as cut-and-dried as some people are making it out to be.
- mankash666 8y ago
  Come on!! Google didn't lawyer up and force a 3-word, confusing brand down Weinberg's throat. If you want to compete with a market leader, whose domain is 2.5 syllables long, and you pick a confusing, 3 word megadomain for a brand, you don't get to cry foul over Duck.com !
  - thaumaturgy 8y ago
    The name is probably the most boring criticism of DDG that anybody can come up with. And anyway, it's also irrelevant here. The question was over whether Google is using their position to deliberately redirect users to their own search engine. I don't know if they are or not, I was just correcting the timeline that some people were getting wrong and adding background info.
mankash666 8y ago
Duck!=DuckDuckGo. If you're picking an awfully long name to compete against what is already a 2.5 syllable verb (Google), who's to blame? Then there's the whole, "But our users only remember Duck" straw-man. Whose fault is that? Google's? Did they lawyer up and force a 3 word, 5+ syllable megaword as a brand/domain on you, when it defies common sense to pick LONG names for a service/domain you expect users to use a hundred times a day.
davewasthere 8y ago
They could not be evil and redirect it to duckduckgo.
BrandoElFollito 8y ago
I get a On2 page which mentions duckduckgo (the competitor search). This is from France at least.

50 points by davidbarker 8y ago

As fun as this crazy conspiracy theory is, this is because Google acquired The Duck Corporation (which is what On2 used to be called), which owned duck.com. They basically predate DDG. (they were acquired in 2009, ddg was started late 2008)

oh_sigh 8y ago
And it should be noted that the On2 acquisition happened at almost the exact time as the creation of duckduckgo, so it's unlikely DDG was even on the radar of anyone in google at that time.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
The difference seems to be that on2.com has an appropriate landing page: https://twitter.com/Richiesque/status/1019973138417938432 https://twitter.com/Richiesque/status/1019973138417938432 Whereas duck.com, a commonly interesting domain name for their competitor (which DDG claims confuses a lot of their users), gets redirected to Google's search engine with no other note whatsoever. Shouldn't duck.com have a similar page to on2.com?
- btian 8y ago
  What about Pulse.io? It also redirects to google.com I believe most of Google's acquisitions redirect to the search engine (unless there's a more appropriate destination).
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I know meebo.com is another acquisition that leads to a landing page rather than a redirect to Google.com. My guess is who puts what on what server and whether or not it's a redirect depends heavily on who is involved in the post-acquisition work, since Google is a big company. I'm not discounting the possibility that it's innocuous, but it's strange that even among the same acquisition, one domain goes to google.com and one goes to a landing page explaining the acquisition. EDIT note: DannyBee's opinion here was posted around the same time as this comment, and suggests a specific corporate strategy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570412
- turc1656 8y ago
  Yes, yes it should. At least that's what I would expect if they were going for transparency. The only thing that would make sense is if On2 (previously known as Duck Corproration) was actually involved in internet search. It was not, ever. So this seems like a clear attempt to drive traffic to me. Both domains were part of the same acquisition. Why put that landing page on On2 but not Duck? The answer is obvious.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  No. Actually, for as long as i've been involved in helping M&A at Google, they have typically turned them down by keeping some regular company page working, and redirecting all the other domains to Google.com homepage. IE what they did here. There are a few cases i can think of where the domain no longer exists, it depended on a lot of things. But basically all "plans" i read was to do the above. At one point early in my google career, i believe pretty much all domains google owned but was not using redirected to google.com. I don't believe this is done any longer in general because people were using it to guess at what Google was doing :)
amanzi 8y ago
That explains why they own the domain name but doesn't explain why they are using it to redirect to their search engine instead of the on2 landing page: http://www.on2.com/ http://www.on2.com/
- rasz 8y ago
  and they kept the same "it has been acquired blabla" page for a year on duck.com https://web.archive.org/web/20101002183258/http://duck.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101002183258/http://duck.com:8...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

thaumaturgy 8y ago

According to the internet archive, it started redirecting between November 2 and December 3 of 2010. After mining a bit of HN history, DDG was already up and running and seeing some use by then (ex. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334720). The issue of the duck.com domain came up back in 2012: > He also said his company had tried to buy the duck.com domain from its previous owner, On2 Technologies, but was rejected. Google eventually acquired the domain when it bought the entire company, and redirects duck.com traffic to Google.com. > "It only started redirecting after we inquired about (buying the domain name)," said Weinberg. "It causes confusion." http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-21/business/sns-rt-us-google-duckduckgobre8al00i-20121121_1_instant-search-feature-google-s-chrome-search-engine http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-21/business/sns-r... (with some wonderfully vitriolic best-of-HN comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817466 -- including a reply from ~yegg explaining his position about this.) edit: Neat, I was able to find DDG's debut on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 That was on September 25, 2008. Google's offer to On2 was in August of 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On2_Technologies#Acquisition_by_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On2_Technologies#Acquisition_b...) (the actual acquisition came later, after Google increased its offer). To be clear, I'm not convinced Google bought On2 just to screw with DDG. But the timeline is not as cut-and-dried as some people are making it out to be.

mankash666 8y ago
Come on!! Google didn't lawyer up and force a 3-word, confusing brand down Weinberg's throat. If you want to compete with a market leader, whose domain is 2.5 syllables long, and you pick a confusing, 3 word megadomain for a brand, you don't get to cry foul over Duck.com !
- thaumaturgy 8y ago
  The name is probably the most boring criticism of DDG that anybody can come up with. And anyway, it's also irrelevant here. The question was over whether Google is using their position to deliberately redirect users to their own search engine. I don't know if they are or not, I was just correcting the timeline that some people were getting wrong and adding background info.

mankash666 8y ago

Duck!=DuckDuckGo. If you're picking an awfully long name to compete against what is already a 2.5 syllable verb (Google), who's to blame? Then there's the whole, "But our users only remember Duck" straw-man. Whose fault is that? Google's? Did they lawyer up and force a 3 word, 5+ syllable megaword as a brand/domain on you, when it defies common sense to pick LONG names for a service/domain you expect users to use a hundred times a day.

davewasthere 8y ago

They could not be evil and redirect it to duckduckgo.

BrandoElFollito 8y ago

I get a On2 page which mentions duckduckgo (the competitor search). This is from France at least.