from Hacker News

Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

by rahiel on 12/12/18, 1:52 PM with 410 comments

  • by cosmojg on 12/12/18, 5:43 PM

    NamePros user, Thelma, made a good point:

    > 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.

  • by zenexer on 12/12/18, 4:36 PM

    Meta:

    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.

  • by ElijahLynn on 12/12/18, 5:23 PM

    Nice! Now DuckDuckGo needs to just change their name to Duck Search and it can be used as a verb.

    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.

  • by sjroot on 12/12/18, 2:34 PM

    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."

    Does an extra syllable really cause that much additional friction?

  • by ddtaylor on 12/12/18, 2:31 PM

    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.

  • by SeanLuke on 12/13/18, 4:41 AM

    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.

    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.

  • by projectramo on 12/12/18, 2:27 PM

    Don't fall for it duckduckgo!

    If you change your name to duck, your name will no longer be searchable!

    It's a trap!

  • by devy on 12/12/18, 6:04 PM

    According to wikipedia,

       On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation...
    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!

  • by mwachs on 12/12/18, 3:29 PM

    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

  • by jerrre on 12/12/18, 2:23 PM

    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...

    Edit: It doesn't roll of my fingers either, I didn't even type out the full name...

  • by brink on 12/12/18, 2:32 PM

    No mention of a sale?

    That seems so strange. I cant think of any other times that a business has given charity to a direct competitor like this.

  • by azatris on 12/12/18, 4:26 PM

    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.

  • by Tobaz on 12/12/18, 2:37 PM

    I'm hoping the phrase "duck it" will become as widespread as "Google it"

  • by jrobn on 12/12/18, 3:56 PM

    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.

  • by abhiminator on 12/12/18, 2:33 PM

    Though this is a good move, DuckDuckGo should really try and work toward taking ownership of http://ddg.com.

    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.

  • by dominicr on 12/12/18, 2:49 PM

    How nice it must be to be so big that you don't have to worry about helping the "competition".

  • by se7entime on 12/12/18, 3:36 PM

    DuckDuckGo People, now you need to buy duck.it domain!

  • by jondubois on 12/12/18, 6:24 PM

    It's hard to think of a worse name than 'DuckDuckGo'. It's amazing that the company managed to survive with a name like that.

  • by Geekette on 12/12/18, 3:52 PM

    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.

  • by rc_kas on 12/12/18, 3:41 PM

    What? that was weirdly nice of Google to do this. I'm very shocked at this.

  • by drawkbox on 12/12/18, 4:44 PM

    If using Firefox, you can now browse the web and search it with some animals, the Fox and the Duck.

  • by mcintyre1994 on 12/12/18, 3:24 PM

    I'm quite surprised there's no .go tld, I could see it being used quite a lot.

  • by babuskov on 12/12/18, 2:23 PM

    No details?

    I need to duck the web to find out more about this. :)

  • by asadkn on 12/12/18, 7:13 PM

    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.

    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.

  • by dplgk on 12/12/18, 2:31 PM

    Is this to fein competition?

  • by ConfusedDog on 12/12/18, 3:12 PM

    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...

  • by IronWolve on 12/12/18, 3:29 PM

    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.

  • by gesman on 12/12/18, 2:51 PM

    Welcomed change!

    I never remembered whether to type duckgogo.com or duckduckgo.com - either of them i had to type twice due to normal fat-fingering :)

  • by _puk on 12/12/18, 2:31 PM

    Interestingly transferred, not bought.

    Does Google buying DDG at this point make sense?

    Given their stance on privacy, it would allow Google control of the narrative..

  • by bch on 12/12/18, 6:16 PM

    I used to refer to the tape like this, but we can now utter “If you can’t Duck it, fuck it.” in (casual) technical conversations.

  • by paul7986 on 12/12/18, 6:46 PM

    That's cool and I wish DDG would offer Duck mail.

    I'd like to diversify my digital life and move away from Google as much as possible!

  • by ElijahLynn on 12/12/18, 5:26 PM

    Imagine if Google had GoogleGoogleGo as their branding from the start. Would they be where they are today?

  • by nojvek on 12/12/18, 3:47 PM

    That’s nice of Google to not be a duck.

  • by cft on 12/12/18, 6:25 PM

    This makes me think that DDG is Google's effort to counter the anti-monopoly arguments.

  • by cylinder on 12/13/18, 12:45 AM

    So will DuckDuckGo change their name to Duck? DuckDuckGo is a terrible name.

  • by marmot777 on 12/12/18, 11:56 PM

    Now that fits their motto of “don’t be evil.” I’m happy to read this story.

  • by k__ on 12/12/18, 4:36 PM

    I use DDG most of the time.

    But for dev related stuff I use Google, results are simply better

  • by izzydata on 12/12/18, 3:37 PM

    Where does DuckDuckGo get the money to keep this service alive?

  • by foxhop on 12/12/18, 5:46 PM

    I would be amused if DDG flipped the domain for cash.

  • by krylon on 12/12/18, 2:59 PM

    ddg.gg is still easier (and for some reason more fun) to type. It might sound silly, but that's what won me over in the beginning.

  • by bprasanna on 12/13/18, 5:23 AM

    A good gesture, which is not powered by AI!

  • by garysahota93 on 12/12/18, 6:49 PM

    I love DuckDuckGo! Been using it for years!

  • by ddoolin on 12/12/18, 6:35 PM

    Now give us back the .dev TLD.

  • by thanatropism on 12/12/18, 5:22 PM

    Has anyone noticed DDG results getting worse lately, btw?

  • by faiz7412 on 12/12/18, 3:57 PM

    This is cool!

  • by scns on 12/12/18, 2:48 PM

    Classy move.

  • by phoe-krk on 12/12/18, 3:11 PM

    About time!

  • by robotrout on 12/12/18, 6:36 PM

    I fear the Goog, even when they bear gifts.

  • by pcmaffey on 12/12/18, 2:48 PM

    Why did google own duck.com?

    Edit: lol

  • by ex_angry_guy on 12/12/18, 5:01 PM

    pretty awesome. except I saw accidental penis via dick.com and my fat fingers.

    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.

  • by kevmo on 12/12/18, 3:19 PM

    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!"

    Google also probably accelerated this potential action to this week because they're taking so much heat and needed positive press.