DuckDuckGo just needs a better logo and a better name and it'd be major league. They've got the difficult part down, but there's no way any real company or serious non-hacker will take them seriously the way they are now.
I want a search engine whose design, name, logo, and style inspire me with confidence and reassurance. I want to see power, I want to see professionalism. I don't want to play games with a duck that lucks like it was drawn by an amateur. I think spending a mere 1k on design and branding will have an incredible impact on DDD now that it's really beginning to get off the ground and catch the eye of people outside the HN/Reddit communities.
Really? I think DuckDuckGo’s brand is incredibly strong, I loved it the first time I saw it. You better stick out and be memorable if you have the balls to enter the search market. I don’t think looking professional (whatever that means) would help.
(The companies with great products on the web – YouTube, Twitter, Google, flickr, Dropbox and so on – in general all don’t have the kinds of professional logos pre-web companies – Mercedes, IBM, Microsoft, Apple and so on – have. Maybe that’s why professional-looking logos don’t manage to inspire much confidence in me on the web.)
I don't know. Initially, Google was far more playful than any of the other search engines of the time. Also "professional" design & branding deteriorates into "boring" far too easily. And boring is unlikely to be noticed. People are likely to remember the duck. If you google for 'duck search', DDG is the first result.
Just providing a counterpoint BTW. You may well be right.
Google is still playful. Their name still is a joke, even if it has become borderline genericized. Also, remember the Pacman ordeal just the other day? Not to mention the numerous Easter eggs for terms like "recursion."
Yes, Google haven't changed, and I was careful to avoid wording it like that. But Bing tries to emulate the playfulness, for example. In the early days Google stood out much more.
You could say the same thing about Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc. In fact every single search engine I can think of has got a blatant disregard for appearing professional.
As ssp pointed out (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226660) you could hardly find something less conspicuous than a duck face in a big red circle. In my view it's a great asset.
When you think of Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, Zappos, Ebay, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, etc, what comes to mind? To me, nothing at all. They don't invoke any particular image in my head. They sound cool, often silly, and are recognizable, but that's as far as they go. That's not the case with DDG, in my opinion. I think about the duck, start making childish associations with it, and always arrive at the same conclusion - that I will not be using it to replace Google. There's got to be a marketing concept/theory/term that describes this component of brand recognition.
Surely having something come to mind is a good thing. It doesn't matter if you personally dislike it, what matters is that you remembered it. For every person who finds it crude and unprofessional there's another who likes it. This second group is the market to capture.
This was discussed previously, and I think that the biggest difference is that Bing and Google are "silly non-specific" while DuckDuckGo is "silly specific", which means that when you think of it, it sounds kind of silly, and you know why and you have a mental picture of a duck or whatever in your head.
Google is kind of a weird word, but it didn't feel quite as silly even way back when it came out. Same with Bing.
No, but I don't think Amazon is very silly name at all. To me it's similar to the company that is called Patagonia. Just named after a geographical region. They could've been called Alps.com and it would've been on a similar level of silliness, IMO (not that silliness is an exact science, but I'm going with my gut here).
totally agree with this. also DuckDuckGo means nothing to non-US users, sounds utterly bizzare.
Sure Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Bing all sound fairly weird - but they were also "new" words with no previous connotations to normal people. Even the name Bing got some hate initially but it has mostly gone away now, DDG remains a name that misses with people. Isn't Duck Duck Go a playground game?
Sorry man, I love your site and actually use it as my default search, but the branding blows. I'm actually going to doodle a better brand for you.
I claim that DDG is a name that hits with people. However, it's a name that people think misses with other people. In other words, I think it's a matter of people imputing some overly-starched-shirt attitude onto others.
This is the Internet. Confidence and reassurance and professionalism are alien concepts to an entity envisioned, built, and maintained by unshaven and very odd people.
The Internet is based on the work of extremely silly people, who just happened to be formidable enough to make their iconoclasm the standard.
DuckDuckGo is exactly the kind of silly, eccentric name that reassures me of competence. Never trust a serious man if you want to change the world.
Everything that you said is correct. However, the majority of people that use the Internet are different. I don't have any data to back this up, but all the non-tech people I've ever interacted with think that "unprofessional looking = untrustworthy"
I firmly disagree about changing the name - you want people having visceral reactions to your brand name, which means being different than everyone else. The fact that people DISLIKE Duck Duck Go is a good sign. The logo though? That might be worth changing maybe. I love the name though. (Well, actually, I initially disliked the name, but I remembered it - hence I like the name from a business branding perspective)
Congrats Gabriel! Glad to see your efforts paying of (at least in mindshare) lately.
Keep adding good features (and taking away bad ones) and listening to your users and you should be golden.
I personally tend to agree with those that say that the name/logo is holding you back (I have a sense of humor and don't take it too seriously, but a lot of people are probably scared off), but it's your thing and you should take it into the direction that you feel will work best.
The only thing I'm annoyed about DDG is its over-reliance on Javascript. Now I'm no luddite; i enjoy the flexibility and power javascript brings.
However I think the first page of results should come with the page response. For people like me with crappy bandwidth, there is a noticeable lag before the first 10 results appear. I'm reasonably happy with the content though; it does an acceptable job of replacing google.
DDG's founder has officially won me over. On my little blog I keep (harrywolff.com) I made a post about Duck Duck Go and Gabe managed to find me and my post. Thank you Gabe. Keep up the very awesome work.
FTA: "It aims to be a Google competitor, providing a host of additional features the search engine giant is missing, like [...] keeping your searches anonymous."
The new category thing is annoying, if I search for 'django' I don't even get a list of links (the top one should be the python django framework) I get a list of things named django. I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of a bunch of junk to get the django web framework link. Maybe make that category thing less aggressive or something one can turn off in the settings.
Thx--I'm working on a setting to disable disambiguation, but I think you're missing the point. Those are the search results. The idea is you click on the one that is most relevant and then get "deep" results tailored to that particular meaning. The stuff at the bottom is meant only to serve you if none of the meanings are what you were looking for.
Just wondering, have you tried getting ddg.com? My only real gripe is I find typing duckduckgo.com to be cumbersome for some reason, even though it's only 4 characters more than 'google'. It just doesn't seem to flow.
I want a search engine whose design, name, logo, and style inspire me with confidence and reassurance. I want to see power, I want to see professionalism. I don't want to play games with a duck that lucks like it was drawn by an amateur. I think spending a mere 1k on design and branding will have an incredible impact on DDD now that it's really beginning to get off the ground and catch the eye of people outside the HN/Reddit communities.