Duck Duck Go, More Like Duck Duck No

http://www.horsesaysinternet.com/search-market/duck-duck-go-no/

by oscar-the-horse • 15 years ago

14 17 15 years ago

horsesaysinternet.com

xentronium• 15 years ago

> The market for search is mature. Everyone has their search engine of choice.

In 1997, everybody knew that search engine market was mature and centered around AltaVista.

oscar-the-horse8• 15 years ago

AltaVista didn't become a verb...

Duck Duck Go can compete, they just need to innovate harder in one direction to get enough space between them and google. And of course that direction needs to have a solid value proposition.

joshuacc• 15 years ago

But Duck Duck Go doesn’t do anything significantly different, or significantly better — as in 10x better.

I disagree. Here are three things that make DDG 10x better for my use case:

1. Providing a common interface for searching API docs. For example, "!jquery live", or "!rails validate".

2. The 0-click box, which frequently gives me the answer I need without having to go any further.

3. Privileging of official sites. This is especially helpful for sites whose domain one couldn't easily guess.

oscar-the-horse8• 15 years ago

1. That's an edge case for developers. Which I sometimes do at the farm. But doesn't help with average users -- unless they want their average users to be programmers.

2. Easy for Google to copy.

3.This is terrible, pushing brand helps destroy verity on the open web.

roflharrison2• 15 years ago

1. There are bang's for lots of sites, http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html (e.g. !amazon bags isn't really for developers). You can now refute this with your "easy for [insert competition] to copy" argument.

2. Fine

3. I'm sure that many people find this useful, but it is very subjective. What results should be higher than an exact match to a search term?

roflharrison2• 15 years ago

>Duck Duck Go doesn’t do anything significantly different

Further to this, Duck Duck Go is targeting people who don't want to be bubbled and tracked, which is completely different to the other search engines.

Having said that, I tried Duck Duck Go for a few weeks and found it wasn't giving me the results I wanted (there's a !bang for Google but that seems a little silly).

oscar-the-horse8• 15 years ago

Blekko.com has granular and optional tracking preferences.

Duck Duck Go doesn't have as much data as Google, and probably don't crawl as deeply. This is another factor that hinders their competitiveness.

If they want to compete they should look to more nascent data sources; rather than going down the path of destructive competition.

rachelbythebay• 15 years ago

For me, it only needs one feature: "it isn't Google".

"Bing Is Not Google" used to be a joke of mine. Now it's actually a useful trait.

skrebbel• 15 years ago

The author is forgetting the massive size of the search engine market. If Duck Duck Go can get even 0.5% of the market, that's millions of users.

Essentially the same story as why Opera is still very much in business.

oscar-the-horse8• 15 years ago

They are a viable lifestyle business. But it depends on what sort of business they want to be. They've taken VC funding which signals they're after more than sub 1% market share.

endersshadow• 15 years ago

The author is a man posing as a horse. The article is clearly not serious. The one before it was entitled "Piracy Should be Legal," in which the horse says that the internet is a copying machine because Xerox invented it.

I believe it's meant to be parody. That, or there's a horse somewhere that can type rather well with hooves.

oscar-the-horse8• 15 years ago

I use natural language machine translation to convert my "nays" into English. I can't type!

It's explained on the about page: http://www.horsesaysinternet.com/about-oscar/

Xerox had a major influence on the internet. The idea is also echoed by those such as Jaron Lanier.

greenyoda• 15 years ago

"But Duck Duck Go doesn’t do anything significantly different, or significantly better — as in 10x better."

Their respect for my privacy is 10000000000x better than Google's.

oscar-the-horse8• 15 years ago

That's speaking from the view of most of the market...

For a small minority it's a really big deal; which is fair enough.

Duck Duck Go, More Like Duck Duck No

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