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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree.

I've said this every time the issue has come up: I think the name is hurting, a lot. More than once, I've wanted to just try a quick search on DDG to see it's comparison to Google, and at least some of those times, I've given up because writing duckduckgo is annoying. Is this logical/rational? NO. Is this how I, at least, behave? YES.

And for anyone saying that you can set up your browser to search DDG automatically, that's great if you've already bought into DDG, but it's not something I would do right off the bat.

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You can set up a keyword search for DDG (for example ddg or just d) and use that when you want to compare. In Chrome, Firefox or Opera just right click in search form and select something along the lines of creating new search, and fill out the keyword.

I have a search keyword even for Google (g), my default search engine is "Feeling Lucky". Other keywords I use are (y)outube, wolfram(a)lpha, google (i)mages, t(orrentz), (m)aps (not google), (r)eddit (not a search per-se, just for opening subreddits), and a few others. For wikipedia, imdb, documentations, .. the feeling lucky is enough.

Yes, you can. But you have to think about it, and put a little bit of effort into it, at a moment you really want to do a quick search.

It makes switching a step with some friction, instead of making it possible to 'ease into it' by simply starting to do some search with ddg quickly.

(Heh, notice that many people in this forum write ddg for duckduckgo? I just made two typos typing that in. It's rather unlikely this is not costing them badly).

This will not take DuckDuckGo mainstream.

FWIW, you can use http://ddg.gg instead (think of it as "DuckDuckGOGOGO!)

I would not so quickly recall 'ddg', if I didn't have 'duckduckgo' as a memory aid. But when I visit the site I always type ddg.gg - so maybe that should be where duckduckgo.com redirects instead of vice versa?

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