Yeah like you pointed out, if your product stands out so much that nothing else matters, then you can name it whatever you want. But duckduckgo is just a glorified meta search engine and they are not doing anything completely unique. In this case branding matters and I think their name is really bad for branding. There are many examples of really bad naming, like cockroachdb and swagger. Swagger ended up changing their name to OpenAPI (Thank god) but I don't know what the cockroachdb guys are thinking. I don't want to use a DB named after a bug (pun intended).

> I wonder, is DuckDuckGo's name a problem for adoption

For me it is too, yeah. They even own duck.co which would be a better brand. It'd be a pain in the arse to tell others to use to start ("duck dot com?" "no, dot co") but nowhere near as silly sounding as duck duck go.

> Privacy is probably slowly growing into a big deal in the minds of regular people, but when the incumbent works, and works better (in my experience Google does just return better results than DDG - and I really did give it a try, in earnest, for a solid week a few months back...), privacy alone isn't going to be enough at this point.

I've had the opposite experience lately, DDG has been almost identical to the google results, to the point where the seem to be calibrating there own searches with google. Unfortunately it means it also suffers the same problems.

>I have no idea what it's supposed to mean

I've understood it to be a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose; the wikipedia article on duckduckgo confirms.

Is this an American thing? I have never heard of it.

I played Duck Duck Goose when I was a kid in Australia.

I played Duck Duck Goose when I was a kid in the United Kingdom.