> The story of Microsoft floating a significant loan to Apple in order to keep Apple solvent in the late '90's is well-known. Microsoft didn't do so out of altruistic impulse; they did so to decrease the odds they'd be the target of anti-trust legislation. I'm sure the c-suite at Google is very aware of that history lesson, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more likely anti-trust target than Google. Alphabet was a proactive effort to stay ahead of that curve. This is another. It's also why I suspect they either gifted Duckduckgo the domain, or sold it at a modest price. Even if they squeezed Duckduckgo for every penny they could and maximized the duck.com sale price, that's a penny in the couch for Google, and of insignificant benefit, compared to the license to print money that they maintain as a monolith.
That might be well known, but it never happened. To resolve a patent violation and alleged stolen source code, Microsoft bought 150 million dollars of Apple stock. (There were other aspects of the agreement, but there was no loan.)
Your general point was likely right - Microsoft could have dragged out the trial for years and they likely didn't want to be seen as the only maker of OS software for personal computers.
At almost the exact same time, MS bought Corel Stock that enabled Corel to stay afloat. It was non-voting stock, but it had a veto on acquisitions (to reasonably protect their investment). They assured people that their didn't intend to use the veto and even worked with Corel to help them find companies to acquire with their new capital (one of them being a certain very cool artistic paint program, whose name I forgot).
Some time late, MS sold their Corel stock to Vector (VC company partly owned by Paul Allen) at a huge loss. Vector then told the Corel board of directors that they would exercise their veto on acquisitions unless the board authorised a buyout by Vector. The penalties on the acquisition deals would have put Corel under, so they had to agree. Vector bought out Corel at an attractive price. Derek Burney (then CEO of Corel), was replaced, but actually gave up his parachute clause in order to take a role as senior program manager as Microsoft. Most of the other senior VPs also managed to land roles at Microsoft. Vector admittedly ran Corel well and made quite a large profit by having a new public offering and selling 25% of the company. They were sued by previous share holders of Corel, but I didn't hear how that lawsuit ended up (I think the previous share holders lost).
I actually talked to Derek Burney about this stuff before he was ousted and he told me that he didn't have any choice in the way it went down. He said they were basically completely out of money before MS stepped in and that without MS's help, they were months away from completely shutting down. He didn't comment about the rest of how it worked out.
My assumption at the time was that the "investment" in Apple was intended to be a similar kind of operation, but that Steve Jobs was too canny to fall for it. I'd love to see all of the conditions attached to that money to see if I'm right.
A company single-handedly helping to save a direct competitor defies all business logic and obligations to shareholders of that company. The truth is this was a business move to benefit Microsoft, even though it had a benevolent factor to it.
Thinking otherwise is overly optimistic, similar to how you believe it being a classic example of HN pessimism.
No. Google has the monopoly on search (outside of China). Avoiding anti-trust is a huge concern of theirs. Look at MS and IE in the browser wars - they were forced by the EU to build into Windows links/ads to the other browsers - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu#/media/File:B...
Whilst DDG has huge momentum by now, duckduckgo.com is still an ache to type - that's why ddg.co has existed for years, and why you use "DDG" yourself ;) duck.com is way more memorable and even faster.
Not a lawyer, but given DDG's brand recognition, I'd imagine they would have a strong case in an ICANN dispute given that Google are not using it. Google are proactively avoiding at least this bad PR by doing the right thing (this week).
Whatever the reason, MS only infused $150 million into Apple’s coffers.
Apple turned around and used $100 million to buy PowerComputing’s Mac license. Apple also continued to lose money for 3 years. The Net $50 million didn’t “save Apple”.
Mozilla brings in revenues in excess of half a billion dollars per year. The royalties alone are in excess of half a billion per year.
Note that the most recent figures we have are from 2016 when Mozilla was on the Yahoo money. The 2018 won't be available for a couple years, but it should hint towards how much the new Google contract brought in. And the intermediate one should show the blip of the Pocket acquisition along with figures sugared by the kickbacks that Mozilla originally lied about not receiving. (Spoiler alert: Mozilla themselves eventually admitted that the info was untrue with regard to not benefitting directly from the Pocket partnership. Just a proviso for anyone who wasn't following along closely and might assume that I'm making baseless conjecture. These are facts.)
NamePros tech admin here. This hammered our servers so hard that we actually uncovered a fairly obscure bug in Nginx's FastCGI caching. It's gone unnoticed for years, including during rigorous load testing.
Never did figure out what caused that problem. We just switched out Nginx for Haproxy and never had a problem again. :)
If anyone is curious what sort of increase in traffic you should expect from a link to your site appearing on HN, we're getting about 230 additional backend requests per second--that doesn't include anything cached by Cloudflare. You can monitor it in realtime here: https://www.nameprosstatus.com/
No longer will you have to say "Did you DuckDuckGo it?" and can instead say "Did you Duck it?".
Even on the domain alone I will use Duck more since I won't have to type in the full DuckDuckGo.com domain.
I _feel_ like this could really bring some measurable growth to Duck search. I _feel_ like I certainly will use it more and talk about it more. Time will tell.
Me: "Ducking Donald"
Siri: "Duck Search found a McDonald's two blocks away, should I reserve you a table?"
(Wondered if I could use this in Dutch too, but decided against it due to the seminal connotations of ‘kwak’…)
For me it’s a constant battle of teaching and reteaching it the different manners of expressing passion and frustration. That’s the one thing I liked about Google’s keyboard on Android: that you could enable “sailor-mouth mode”. They called it something boring though like “Suggest profane words”.
You can also use ddg.gg.
Anyway, I use the Firefox "smart bookmarks" (I don't know if it's the correct name), i.e. naming the bookmark search, so "gg foo" is for searching foo on Google, "dd bar" is for searching bar on DuckDuck, "w baz" is for Wikipedia, "dbts #number" is for the "Debian bug tracking system" and so on...
I think name change must be done. The name is too weird to go mainstream. Think of international customers too. I don't think I want to introduce it to my non English native parents, maybe they'll think it as some weird game.
"Did you duck it?" sounds like asking if one dodged it.
Does an extra syllable really cause that much additional friction?
In casual conversation, "DeeDeeGee it" is so much more clunky.
Edit: somebody beat me to it.
Although as noted by a person responding here "I'll duck it" wouldn't be bad.
> WTF is this duck thing? Where's Google?
I think that wouldn't have happened if it had a more serious name.
I think there's something to three-word names being less memorable than shorter ones, especially when there isn't a clearer hint to function built in.
I have been using DuckDuckGo because I'm making health related queries and I'm pretty scared of companies profiling me based on that.
But the experience with DDG has been worse, although it is definitely improving. And it's bearable, plus protecting my privacy is worth it.
It's extremely obvious/bad when you try Googling some old article about an topic, often political, that has recently regained popularity.
You can try adding all kinds of words from the headline, certain terms will always lead to the results being dominated with "current news", like with Russia/Ukraine or more recently with China.
Which is made worse by the inability to specify a time-frame for the search. In that regard, the best Google can do is narrow it down to "last changed" with the extended search, which only goes as far back as "last year", anything further back than that and you might as well have to find the needle by manually looking trough the haystack of pages upon pages of search results.
It can be extremely frustrating how search results are seemingly dominated by the very same, handful, of articles offering only the very same takes, with only slight variations. It feels quite similar to how YouTube keeps recommending the same kind of weird videos to a large amount of people, like you are being "funneled".
Filter bubbles are personalized, so YMMV.
DDG feels like it gives me the same search results every time. Typically they are more helpful than google would have been early on but less helpful than googles were later on.
This is entirely anecdotal... Anyone else experience something similar?
Usually when I search for something I don't care about any of that, I just want to see the organic matches, not "People also ask" and "People also search for" widgets that are of no value to me.
DDG only has the wikipedia widget (which I actually find pretty useful generally) and sometimes the video or image carousel at the top which is sometimes relevant and doesn't waste a lot of screen real estate. I hope it'll continue that way.
Does this work? I was under the impression that had little to no impact on their tracking/suggestions for "personalization" purposes
Both have in common that if they don't know the answer to your query, they assume they know better than you and give you unrelated results. I'd prefer if they'd just print "Can't find anything" and let me tweak my query instead of sending back random results.
Perhaps search engines could just not show you lower confidence results, but then you risk making it impossible to find certains kinds of content, and you forgo the rarer, but still extant wins, you get from showing those results.
Users can generally tell when results aren't relevant and will reformulate anyway.
I’m as de-Googled as I can be. I caught a lot of slack (?) from some people over it. But it’s a relief for me.
The main things I find myself still using the !g code for is news and maps. But for other searches I finally find I get just as good results.
https://duck.co/help/results/sources
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results.
So, the DuckDuckBot that you cited doesn't contribute to DDG's organic results?
90% of what Google returns to me is Wikipedia, IMDB, and other verticals anyway, so it's not that much different IME.
I never felt google searches were bad, nor do I have problems with the results from ddg. This was just a privacy decision I guess, one that is easy to make with little sacrifice.
I like that it uses Yelp vs Google listings. Yelp has its issues but Google listings are usually less reliable.
they really have been upping their game and continue to do so. the other day, I was looking for a specific paper, not so old, from 2012. admittedly, for papers, I still use Google, I guess because of the link to G scholar.
I couldn't find it within about 5mins and switched to DDG. it was on p.1 of DDG. that was really great to see.
In the late 80s, Sequential Circuits went belly up due to some bad product decisions. Yamaha bought the remnants of the company, and Smith himself went to work at Korg, where he helped develop an important line of machines (the Wavestation).
In 2002 Smith decided to try again with his own company. As Yamaha owned the Sequential Circuits name, he settled on Dave Smith Instruments (or DSI). The company did quite well in its own boutique business (high-quality analog polyphonic synthesizers).
In 2015, Roland's founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, who had collaborated with Smith on MIDI, went to Takuya Nakata, the President of Yamaha -- a 3.5 billion dollar revenue company mind you -- and together they decided to unilaterally give Smith the famous Sequential Circuits trademark back as a thank-you and gesture of good-will. Kakeshashi said "I feel that it’s important to get rid of unnecessary conflict among electronic musical instrument companies. That is exactly the spirit of MIDI. For this reason, I personally recommended that the President of Yamaha, Mr. Nakata, return the rights to the Sequential name to Dave Smith." DSI has since been renamed Sequential.
I'm not sure Smith was even aware of their plan. Two of the most powerful people in the music instrument business just gave him his famous company name back for free.
I like to think Google was doing this.
If you change your name to duck, your name will no longer be searchable!
It's a trap!
That is a foul.
Or, more accurately, a water-foul.
Edit: found it near the end of page 6! Alongside "Duck Donuts" and "London Duck Tours".
1st result: Wikipedia Duck
2nd: Wooden Ducks
3rd: BBC duck recipes
4th: Toilet duck cleaner
5th: BBC iplayer, Sarah and Duck
It goes on. The only mention of duckduckgo on the first 5 pages is this recent news
1st is EN wikipedia with "Duck"
2nd is DuckDuckGo
3rd and on is several restaurants with "duck" in the name.
So it probably is location/language related to some extend.
Once more, duckduckgo.com comes up as the first result. Once more, from _Germany_. "duck" is a German word (imperative, as in "duck and cover"), but it is really rare, so I would not be surprised if the search results were biased in favor of our new fowl overlords. But I don't think it's all filter bubble, either.
a. Top stories [not organic result]
1. Wikipedia
b. Maps to "duck" restaurants [not organic]
2. Wiktionary
3. allaboutbirds.org/guide/browse/shape/Ducks
4. Merriam Webster
5. Related article from theverge.com
6. duckduckgo.com
Top hit - duckduckgo.com
And it's already #1 for me (but that's likely because I've used the site before, and Google knows that)
On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation...
See https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates for details.
Edit: It doesn't roll of my fingers either, I didn't even type out the full name...
Every time I mention/recommend it to someone the response is always a blank stare followed by something along the lines of “I would never use that if only to avoid that horrible name / brand URL”. And I can’t say I blame them.
I feel like anyone who grew up in a region where duck, duck goose was a common game for children to play wouldn't be too confused about the name.
Not that being confused about the name or disliking it is a bad thing. But I like the name, and it's part of the reason I chose to start using DDG.
If they changed it to something more generic, I'd be less likely to keep using it because I'd feel less of a connection to the brand. If I'm going to use something that generic and corporate, then Binging sounds more fun than Ducking.
I do realize that potentially losing me as a user doesn't mean this would be a bad move for DDG overall.
He had acquired the name Duck Duck Go before deciding to create a search engine. So when he started he just used that name for his next project and it stayed.
It’s clearly due for some rebranding. Duck alone works great for that. It’s got some relavance to their current name, it’s short, there will never be a shortage of puns and word play.
That seems so strange. I cant think of any other times that a business has given charity to a direct competitor like this.
The US would not have put a man on the moon if it wasn't for the Soviet Union trying to do the same. Not having credible competition is bad from a purely professional point of view because you need someone to spur you on.
Since about 2003-2004 search has not really been a real competition in the west. Google has had an unhealthy dominance. I have worked for three search engine companies (Fast, Yahoo and Google) and I can remember how inspiring the early days were when there was half a dozen search engines to compete against.
I particularly enjoyed trying to figure out how the competition did things. At the time you had narrow problems people worked on that perhaps only a dozen other people in the world cared deeply about. Published research hadn't always caught up with what was happening so you spent some amount of time trying to read between the lines and measure things to figure out what the competition was up to.
One of my fondest memories is a lunch I had with Jeff Dean when I slid a napkin over the table with a graph on it. He took one look at it, smiled and said "did you figure it out?". I said "no, did you?". And he said "I have no idea".
Today search just exists and I no longer give a shit about it. It doesn't strike me as fun anymore. Because there is no real competition. I'm pretty sure that at least the engineers at Google would soil themselves with joy if they got a real competitor.
sort of like google giving money to wikipedia, I suspect they do infact collect information on ddg searches and can aggregate it and make something useful from the information. in fact, they can probably infer that ddgs initial response was poor and determine their weaknesses etc
Apple was about to go under and Microsoft saved it in order to have a competitor.
https://www.mac-history.net/apple-history-tv/2008-07-19/macw...
Furthermore: if a retailer can use my location data to predict demand, they can optimize their logistics and save fuel.
Do you think those cost-savings will be passed down onto you?
I hate how Google has become a verb and I don't want to see another one named after a company. I miss the days of Lycos, Hotbot, Dogpile, Excite and where you could search for terms on different engines and get different results.
As these things sometimes go, mass adoption happened. What used to be cute and funny is now free marketing for a search tech behemoth but with people unwilling to give up this initial connotation of "tech savvy."
I've long since reverted to "search online" or "search the web", but I do hope "to duck" gains some prominence; it could be the new "tech savvy" verb to use.
Not quite, but the design, layout and editing is indeed hilariously outdated.
With the 'D' and 'G' key separated by just one key in between on a standard QWERTY keyboard, this should really make it exponentially easier to get to DuckDuckGo's homepage.
I need to duck the web to find out more about this. :)
And what did I type? duckgogo.com.
I'm sure there are others who find the name not so memorable. duck.com makes it simple.
The concern about the branding is understandable, but I haven't typed "Google" or "DuckDuckGo" when I want to use their services in aeons, and I don't even make use of bookmarks.
Here's an example: https://binged.it/2EhrUDm I don't think you can line up multiple searches like that on Google. It's far and away my favorite feature of Bing.
It's good for navigation, and great for the "satellite" view.
I never remembered whether to type duckgogo.com or duckduckgo.com - either of them i had to type twice due to normal fat-fingering :)
Does Google buying DDG at this point make sense?
Given their stance on privacy, it would allow Google control of the narrative..
The only reason I use it is because it isn't a Google company... well and the !bangs are good too.
I'd like to diversify my digital life and move away from Google as much as possible!
But for dev related stuff I use Google, results are simply better
Edit: lol
Search giant Google acquired the Duck.com domain name in 2010 with the acquisition of On2, a video codec company.
https://mobile.twitter.com/robshilkin/status/102045801917422...
> Search giant Google acquired the Duck.com domain name in 2010 with the acquisition of On2, a video codec company.
edit: u is right next to i guys. this is not a valueless comment. it’s a legitimate thing that will happen to someone you know.
Google also probably accelerated this potential action to this week because they're taking so much heat and needed positive press.
DDG is just a frontend to Bing. They need Bing to exist, not DDG.