<story><title>Google competitor DuckDuckGo says it&apos;s getting shut out</title><url>http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-google-duckduckgobre8al00i-20121121,0,6650221.story</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulsutter</author><text>This article is pure crybaby bullshit PR about a nonexistent problem. Does anyone care about DDG anyway? They&apos;re trying to solve a completely imaginary problem, and they haven&apos;t got a hope in hell of creating a viable search engine as that costs billions of dollars.&lt;p&gt;Why is this article even on HN?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>javajosh</author><text>Why is your comment the #1 comment? I mean, I count 3, count them, &lt;i&gt;3&lt;/i&gt; unsubstantiated claims:&lt;p&gt;1. Does anyone care about DDG anyway? I think it&apos;s safe to say, yes, there are some who do. I for one.&lt;p&gt;2. The problem DDG is solving is imaginary. Oh really? What precisely is that problem? Is it search itself that you&apos;re referring to, or the prospect of going up against Google? If the former, then you are delusional, and if the latter, there is nothing wrong with attempting to disrupt a monopoly.&lt;p&gt;3. A search engine costs billions of dollars. Actually, no. There is no rule of computer science that says that. If someone discovers a new, cheaper way to do search then cool!&lt;p&gt;In answer to your final question, perhaps the reason this article is on HN is to inspire comments like yours, which are wrong, and then comments like mine, which correct comments like yours.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google competitor DuckDuckGo says it&apos;s getting shut out</title><url>http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-google-duckduckgobre8al00i-20121121,0,6650221.story</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulsutter</author><text>This article is pure crybaby bullshit PR about a nonexistent problem. Does anyone care about DDG anyway? They&apos;re trying to solve a completely imaginary problem, and they haven&apos;t got a hope in hell of creating a viable search engine as that costs billions of dollars.&lt;p&gt;Why is this article even on HN?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yegg</author><text>Hi, this is Gabriel Weinberg, the guy mentioned in the article.&lt;p&gt;The main issue I have is with duck.com. A lot of people remember that we are a search engine &quot;duck something&quot; and so naturally try duck.com. As a result, there is a lot of confusion, e.g.:&lt;p&gt;&quot;I was telling someone about DuckDuckGo and they thought it was Duck.com and they went to Google.  Is Google using this to find people who make the mistake to Duck.com instead of DuckDuckGo?&quot;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Can&apos;t you do something about this?  I keep going to Duck.com when meaning to visit DuckDuckGo.com They are using the DuckDuckGo name to get people to search Google.&quot;&lt;p&gt;This only started happening after I asked about the domain name. It used to point to a history page about Duck Corporation (previous name of On2 -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20100802014055/http://duck.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://web.archive.org/web/20100802014055/http://duck.com/&lt;/a&gt;), similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.on2.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.on2.com/&lt;/a&gt;, which was acquired by Google in the same acquisition.&lt;p&gt;Google should legitimately not sell it to me, though it would have been of course nice to do so when I first asked in 2010. I think an appropriate remedy would be to either point it nowhere, point it to the original page it had been pointed to for many years, or point it to the acquisition page (as &lt;a href=&quot;http://on2.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://on2.com&lt;/a&gt; still does) -- all things they do in other cases if you look at past acquisitions.&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, it is only anti-competitive because it causes confusion, and relates to their core search product. The facts of the situation (that it switched shortly after I asked, and only seemingly that one domain) make it appear to be deliberate. And if it were not deliberate, I&apos;ve brought this up many times and there has been ample time (including now!) to correct the situation.&lt;p&gt;With regards to being easy to add search engines to Chrome, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/usability-issues-with-adding-search-engines-to-web-browsers.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/usability-issues...&lt;/a&gt;. I&apos;ve written up the differences extensively, with screenshots and explanatory notes.</text></comment>