Hacker News Reader

Comment by epi0Bauqu | Hacker News Reader

I get consistent feedback that it is confusing people.

Define "consistent". There are over 300 million people in the US alone. If 1% of them are stupid enough to be confused, you could get as many as 3,000,000 such pieces of feedback. That doesn't mean it's a substantive problem.

3,000,000 people is a substantive problem, no matter what percentage of some population they comprise.

No, it really isn't. These are the same people that can't locate the Pacific Ocean on a map.

As ericd said, it depends on the percentage of DDG's userbase, as well as the effect on the bottom line. From a business perspective, that's 6,000,000 highly impressionable eyeballs that aren't generating ad revenue. From an ethical perspective, those are human beings that "deserve" access to a good search engine to e.g. help them learn how to read a map.

Your "ethical perspective" is only relevant if DDG is a "good" search engine. Considering the extreme slowness and utter irrelevancy of results, I think you'll find that a highly debatable issue.

Now you're not even trying to conceal your trolling. Keep it civil or buzz off.

I'm not the one who injected a question of quality into the discussion, and not agreeing with the obviously-biased founder of DDG is not "trolling". Please apologize.

If somebody is using it, they presumably think that it is good, your opinion on the matter is irrelevant to them. Hell, the issue of quality doesn't even have bearing on nitrogen's statement; it works just as well if you remove the word 'good'. You very clearly were trolling and I will certainly will not apologize.

Furthermore, nitrogen is not epi0Bauqu.

> You very clearly were trolling and I will certainly will not apologize.

Well, you'll be happy to know I'll be ignoring anything you post from now on. I certainly won't engage with someone who can't tell the difference between honest fundamental disagreement and trolling.

Just to clarify, is your honest fundamental disagreement that "people that can't locate the Pacific Ocean on a map" are not important users?

I think that's a problem.

The more valid way of looking at it is what percentage of his user base are confused by it.

And it's not a matter of stupidity, especially before a user has a solid idea of what DDG is.

> The more valid way of looking at it is what percentage of his user base are confused by it.

Hence my question. All he said was "consistent". What does that mean? It's not a quantifiable unit. He could get a complaint every minute, or he could get one every day, or every year, all of these would be "consistent", but their meaning differs vastly.

> And it's not a matter of stupidity, especially before a user has a solid idea of what DDG is.

If their response to being told about a thing called "duck duck go" is to go to a web browser and type in "duck.com", it's stupidity. They're treating a domain name as a "do what I mean" mechanism. It's not. It's an address.

If I hear the restaurant is at "123 <garbled>", is the correct solution to go to building numbered "123" on the nearest street and get angry when it's not the restaurant?

Keep in mind that DDG's url is duck.co and .com is still the default, in most people's mind.

Also, consistent usually means uncontested and unambiguous, rather than representing some quantity.

Edit: DDG's url is not actually duck.co, that's just the community url.

duck.co is not the URL for the DuckDuckGo search engine, nor are most people even aware of its existence. The search engine is at duckduckgo.com, right where it should be.

Ah yeah, you're right about that, thought he'd come out with it as an alias.

http://ddg.gg is a common short alias for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com