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Comment by holman | Hacker News Reader

Names are important. Putting aside that "DuckDuckGo" itself is still an odd naming choice, this choice isn't much better, considering the blog post mistypes it too:

    > DuckDuckGo chat bot: im@ddg.gg
    > DuckDuckGo now has a chat bot at im@ddd.gg that will respond [...]

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>"DuckDuckGo" itself is still an odd naming choice

I think what makes the name weird is that it interjects not zero, not one, but TWO hard sounds ("ck") in the middle of the name. It requires 5 movements to speak it out loud (Du-ck-Du-ck-Go), as oppossed to 2 (Goo- Gel). One has to be careful with adding hard sounds into the middle of product names.

It's not the "ck" sound that makes it difficult/slow; it's the "ck" followed immediately by the "d". Both sounds are stops, and stops are somewhat difficult to produce consecutively.

Compare with a name like "Conoco", which contains the same sound that you were complaining about in DuckDuckGo twice as well, but is much easier to say because both occurrences of it are preceded and followed by vowels.

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