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Comment by susam | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo has been my primary search tool for close to a decade now. I also like that ddg.gg redirects to duckduckgo.com. The domain ddg.gg is much easier to type on web browsers where I do not have DuckDuckGo configured as a search engine.

I stumbled upon DuckDuckGo fortuitously after installing Vimperator in Firefox around 2009 or so. If I remember correctly, Vimperator had DuckDuckGo as one of the search engine options and that's how I came to know about it.

I use Vimium with Firefox these days and it is really easy to choose either DuckDuckGo or Google for searching using the keyboard sequences od<space> or og<space>, respectively, if these are enabled as custom search engines in the Vimium options page.

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I believe it's their name (and domain) that is holding them back. Sure, Google is a silly word but it's now ubiquitous. But "Duck Duck Go" simply doesn't roll off the tongue. It will make adoption much harder.

The shame of it all is that they do own duck.com. Why not rebrand at this point?

So instead of answering questions by saying "why don't you just google it" people could suggest that you someone "duck it".

Hmmm, maybe that has problems of it's own...

Seriously the name is awful. I really think it hurts adoption.

You clearly don't remember the https://www.dogpile.com/

We remember it, we forgot it, terrible name

Dogpile was at least memorable. I had to remind myself how to spell Cuil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuil

Edit: also, dogpile is somehow still around.... which is worth something I suppose.

Branding seems to be a major problem when it comes to non-commercial (or at the very least "alternative", since DDG is technically still for-profit) services. DDG isn't even that bad in comparison to some others like Mastodon or various Linux desktop apps.

GoDaddy has a similar weird origin.

And I remember when I first heard about Google in the 80's! One of my uncles learned about 1 google from a math book. 10+ years later I heard it again meaning "don't be evil", and now it means "eat my spam". Amazing how people get used to words and silly brand names, just don't make me start with micro-soft ;)

duck.com works as well.

Fun fact: DuckDuckGo has this domain because Google gave it to them after acquiring it for unrelated reasons. It had been the domain of video codec developer Duck Corporation, which changed its name to On2 and was later acquired by Google primarily to get its patent portfolio for the WebM effort.

Google wouldn't assign any IP over without some terms and conditions, which may be what's limiting them from adopting it.

They should drop the "DuckGo". Just "Duck". It's cleaner.

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