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Well in fact, I think the name has a ring to it. The logo too complements it well. I guess what's not working for DDG is that it's a me-too product. It boils d
by pavanlimo 14y ago
Well in fact, I think the name has a ring to it. The logo too complements it well.
I guess what's not working for DDG is that it's a me-too product. It boils down to this: What does DDG have that Google doesn't?.
Me-too products can perform reasonably well if they are launched by corps with deep pockets for obvious reasons(like G+). Otherwise, a company like DDG has to have something different and unique to offer.
Oh, btw, that privacy hullabaloo works only for a very small percentage of the users. Most don't care or ignore.
- lowboy 14y agoDDG doesn't track you[0] or put you in a filter bubble[1]. They also have the bang syntax[2] for searching other sites/engines. 0: http://donttrack.us/ http://donttrack.us/ 1: http://dontbubble.us/ http://dontbubble.us/ 2: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
- stcredzero 14y agoDoes the mainstream audience care about all that?
- andrewguenther 14y agoThey do if it gives them what they perceive to be better results. (Specifically the lack of filter bubble)
- babarock 14y agoDoes everything have to be about mainstream audience? I don't know if DDG's goal is to take over Google's market share, but I can say that, as a (wannabe) hacker, I've been using it as my default search engine for the past year or so. What seduced me was the reasons stated by my grandparent comment (and the fact that good ol' Google search is a "!g" away). Not everything has to please the mainstream. Discussing whether DuckDuckGo is a good name is one thing. But to questions the features of the engine on account that it's not "mainstream" misses the point. I think.
- pavanlimo 14y agoAs a matter of fact, not everything has to be about mainstream audience, it depends on the product. http://scholar.google.co.in http://scholar.google.co.in is not meant to be a mainstream product. Where as http://google.com/search http://google.com/search is a mainstream product. And DDG thinks itself as Google's competitor with a heart for privacy, that's their USP. So yes, as far as DDG is concerned, mainstream matters. It's a generic search engine, not a vertical for scholars or the like.
- pavanlimo 14y agoAgreed. But my reply will be a classic "try explaining that to my mum".
- lowboy 14y agoI agree that the benefits are not well understood to those outside of the tech world and to them DDG is definitely a me-too site.
- arikrak 14y agoI don't think these reasons are so strong. If you're not signed into Google, you don't need to worry about tracking. And you can turn off personalized results: https://www.google.com/preferences https://www.google.com/preferences. The Bang sytax is usually worse than doing a Google site search, since Google usually does a better job ranking a site's content than the website itself.
- whichdan 14y agoI would bet money that Google "anonymously" tracks you regardless of whether you're logged in or not. And by anonymous, that's only until someone data mines the dozens of searches you do per day.
- lowboy 14y agoTurning off personalized results doesn't stop Google from tracking you, it just stops leveraging that tracking for your benefit. And I misspoke about the bang syntax: it actually runs a search on the target website. If you search for "foobar !g" on DDG, it redirects you to this page: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foobar https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foobar. Same as "kitten video !yt" redirs to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kitten%20video https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kitten%20video. edit: I misread your comment about goog's site search indexing vs a site's native search. That is entirely site dependent. And it's still only a "kitten videos site:youtube.com !g" away in DDG.
- jhdevos 14y agoDid you notice that you keep abreviating their name? DuckDuckGo is just not something you want to type in, and that will stop people going there.
- billdhn 14y agoBingo! name needs a pivot
- davewasthere 14y agoOr, google could have tried to not be evil and redirect duck.com to DDG instead of google when they bought it to prevent Gabriel from getting it.