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Comment by Valakas_ | Hacker News Reader

DDG should change their name though. Seriously. Who wants to use such a ridiculous sounding search engine? AltaVista sounded good and had a meaning (seeing from above). Yahoo fine. Bing also ok. But duckduckgo seems like the most ridiculous name someone came up on a brainstorm meeting for search engine names. But then they did went with it.

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They own duck.com and it redirects to their site. They should just adopt "duck.com" as their main brand, which will inevitably get shortened to "Duck" in everyday conversation.

Then we can turn it into a verb. "Go Duck <term>"

They could even capitalize on the famous autocorrect substitutions: "Need an answer? Duck it!"

Are you telling me to go duck myself?

Wow. I did not know this. They should absolutely do as you suggest. Duck is a far better name.

IIRC, Google actually owned duck.com until a few years back, when they voluntarily handed it over to DDG.

FWIW, because On2 aka Duck TrueMotion —> VP3-VP7

I once worked with an "interesting" guy who had a tshirt that read "If you can't duck it, fuck it" over an image of a roll of duct tape.

Unfortunately Apple's autocorrect has totally hijacked the meaning of "Go duck ___"

100% agree. It is so obviously a huge impediment.

Weird names can be overcome (see "google"), but weird + clunky + needs to disrupt massive established players... what are they thinking?

At least lose the "Go".. DuckDuck we can work with.

They already own duck.com

Well that has terrible SEO.

Nah HotBot and AskJeeves didn't have a problem back in the day. Google sounded just as ridiculous when it came out.

I'd argue that HotBot is a lot more catchy since 1) it rhymes, 2) it's shorter in length.

AskJeeves would also be abbreviated in conversation to just "Jeeves", which is definitely as the original creators intended. "DuckDuckGo" doesn't have these features going for it.

Dogpile

Lycos.

Bing.

Excite.

AltaVista.

Veronica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)

With the blink of an 'y', Hotbot was one letter away from something completely different. Although the term NSFW was yet to be invented back then.

One of my first exposures to "typo squatting" was when I accidentally typed in "hotbat" in the early 2000's. It led to some generic porn site with a girl in a tight tshirt holding a baseball bat as a splash image. No other real connection to the name as far as I could tell. Just a run of the mill (for the time) paid porn site.

In another universe, search is run by Hotboy.com, with its hotmale.com email system

I agree, naming is very important. I once tried to have a conversation with a group of colleagues about Coq, and literally the conversation couldn’t move past the name. Now I just use TLA+ or Lean.

To me it seems search engines needs weird name.

Maybe I'm wrong and someone has a list of somewhat successful general search engine with a somewhat serious names besides Alta Vista (and I never thought about that before) and Fast?

Frankly that was my reaction when I first heard of "google".

At least to most normal people "google" would have sounded like a silly, made up word. Or like, the most association it might have had would be to something like googley eyes.

DuckDuckGo has the disadvantage of not only sounding silly, but also being composed of silly-sounding real words. And not having a secret geeky meaning that people find out about and then feel like they're part of an elite club.

This comment is so unrelatable to me, every kid over the age of 7 when I was in school knew what a google was or better yet, a googleplex. This was also in the 90s so it predates the search engines popularity by a good bit.

It was, simply put, the biggest named number anyone knew and was frequently used as such in arguments... e.g. I watched that movie 1000 times! Oh ya? Well I watched it a google times.

>>>every kid over the age of 7 when I was in school knew what a google was or better yet, a googleplex. This was also in the 90s so it predates the search engines popularity by a good bit.

Same here, as someone who was in high school in the late 90s and switched from AskJeeves/Yahoo/Altavista to Google around ~2000, part of the appeal was "Somebody named a search engine after the biggest number meme we know? AND it's fast? AND it gives good results? Lemme check this out..."

googol = 10^100

// did that get auto-corrected? if so, ironic, as it’s said "Google" was an accidental misspelling of "googol" by Sean Anderson back in ‘97…

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html

Last night, driving home through a not great part of Detroit at nearly 10:00pm, I saw a box truck with DDG advertising on all sides. I was amused by the dedication to offline advertising.

It's a ridiculous name because it's a ridiculous company. "Private" search engine, hosted on US-based Microsoft Azure servers? Give me a break, what a complete joke.

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