DDG should change their name though. Seriously. Who wants to use such a ridiculous sounding search engine? AltaVista sounded good and had a meaning (seeing from above). Yahoo fine. Bing also ok. But duckduckgo seems like the most ridiculous name someone came up on a brainstorm meeting for search engine names. But then they did went with it.
They own duck.com and it redirects to their site. They should just adopt "duck.com" as their main brand, which will inevitably get shortened to "Duck" in everyday conversation.
Then we can turn it into a verb. "Go Duck <term>"
They could even capitalize on the famous autocorrect substitutions: "Need an answer? Duck it!"
I'd argue that HotBot is a lot more catchy since 1) it rhymes, 2) it's shorter in length.
AskJeeves would also be abbreviated in conversation to just "Jeeves", which is definitely as the original creators intended. "DuckDuckGo" doesn't have these features going for it.
One of my first exposures to "typo squatting" was when I accidentally typed in "hotbat" in the early 2000's. It led to some generic porn site with a girl in a tight tshirt holding a baseball bat as a splash image. No other real connection to the name as far as I could tell. Just a run of the mill (for the time) paid porn site.
I agree, naming is very important. I once tried to have a conversation with a group of colleagues about Coq, and literally the conversation couldn’t move past the name. Now I just use TLA+ or Lean.
Maybe I'm wrong and someone has a list of somewhat successful general search engine with a somewhat serious names besides Alta Vista (and I never thought about that before) and Fast?
At least to most normal people "google" would have sounded like a silly, made up word. Or like, the most association it might have had would be to something like googley eyes.
DuckDuckGo has the disadvantage of not only sounding silly, but also being composed of silly-sounding real words. And not having a secret geeky meaning that people find out about and then feel like they're part of an elite club.
This comment is so unrelatable to me, every kid over the age of 7 when I was in school knew what a google was or better yet, a googleplex. This was also in the 90s so it predates the search engines popularity by a good bit.
It was, simply put, the biggest named number anyone knew and was frequently used as such in arguments... e.g. I watched that movie 1000 times! Oh ya? Well I watched it a google times.
>>>every kid over the age of 7 when I was in school knew what a google was or better yet, a googleplex. This was also in the 90s so it predates the search engines popularity by a good bit.
Same here, as someone who was in high school in the late 90s and switched from AskJeeves/Yahoo/Altavista to Google around ~2000, part of the appeal was "Somebody named a search engine after the biggest number meme we know? AND it's fast? AND it gives good results? Lemme check this out..."
Last night, driving home through a not great part of Detroit at nearly 10:00pm, I saw a box truck with DDG advertising on all sides. I was amused by the dedication to offline advertising.
It's a ridiculous name because it's a ridiculous company. "Private" search engine, hosted on US-based Microsoft Azure servers? Give me a break, what a complete joke.
