NamePros user, Thelma, made a good point:<p>> 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.
Meta:<p>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.
Nice! Now DuckDuckGo needs to just change their name to Duck Search and it can be used as a verb.<p>No longer will you have to say "Did you DuckDuckGo it?" and can instead say "Did you Duck it?".<p>Even on the domain alone I will use Duck more since I won't have to type in the full DuckDuckGo.com domain.<p>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.
This is cool and I hope it leads to a rebranding. While I like DDG a lot, the name has always felt off-putting to me. I'd much rather say "I'll just search Google" than "I'll just search DuckDuckGo."<p>Does an extra syllable really cause that much additional friction?
DDG is great - have been using it for months and I really enjoy the results. Google searches seem to be more of an echo chamber whereas DDG results seem to be more representative across a broad spectrum of sites.
In the 1980s an engineer named Dave Smith, who ran a very popular music synthesizer outfit called Sequential Circuits, proposed an open protocol for connecting music synthesizers. The idea was scoffed at by a number of manufacturers, but relatively soon Roland, and eventually the other major Japanese firms (Korg, Yamaha, Kawai) got on board, and that caused everyone else to join in. The standard became known as MIDI.<p>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).<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>I like to think Google was doing this.
According to wikipedia,<p><pre><code> On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation...
</code></pre>
So it all makes sense now and all the conspiracy theories about Google's ownership proven false. And kudos to Google for transferring a high value domain ownership out to a competitor!
Technical question: Since DuckDuckGo uses Bing Ads, and Bing Ads have tracking that allow for remarketing, is there a point?
advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/audience-targeting/universal-event-tracking
Might be a nice step towards rebranding for a bigger audience? I use DDG as a default search engine, but the name doesn't roll off the tongue nicely at all...<p>Edit: It doesn't roll of my fingers either, I didn't even type out the full name...
I wish everyone used DDG for the sake of privacy, but I cannot. It just doesn't give me answers that I am expecting. It reads my mind less than Google and that's a problem.
Google is like a french word that rolls off the tongue.
Duck is like a anglo/norse, sharp and harsh but satisfying like our other favorite 4 letter word.
Though this is a good move, DuckDuckGo should really try and work toward taking ownership of <a href="http://ddg.com" rel="nofollow">http://ddg.com</a>.<p>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.
Seems quite the timely strategic PR move from Google; this might alleviate some of the bad press it's been battling lately (public leak of DragonFly project, workers' protest and public petition against it, etc). Good for DDG, though.
Having heard and tried DuckDuckGo many times over the years, the other day, I thought about giving it the nth try, to finally switch from Google.<p>And what did I type? duckgogo.com.<p>I'm sure there are others who find the name not so memorable. duck.com makes it simple.
I do feel like DuckDuckGo is too long to type. That's a barrier for me. Rebranding to just Duck might be a good thing, but why "duck" ... not my favorite animal, or why animal at all...
I use also use ddg, but maps.google is far better for maps. So I mix both, using an addon, I can right click an address and send to google maps. Its a nice compromise.
Welcomed change!<p>I never remembered whether to type duckgogo.com or duckduckgo.com - either of them i had to type twice due to normal fat-fingering :)
Interestingly transferred, not bought.<p>Does Google buying DDG at this point make sense?<p>Given their stance on privacy, it would allow Google control of the narrative..
pretty awesome. except I saw accidental penis via dick.com and my fat fingers.<p>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.
This is not charity. Google needs DDG to exist, because Google is a monopoly. That economic reality is increasingly translating into political calls for GOOG to be broken up. Supporting DDG is just Google preparing for future legal and legislative/regulatory battles. They can point to DDG and say, "Look! There is another search company!"<p>Google also probably accelerated this potential action to this week because they're taking so much heat and needed positive press.