At DuckDuckGo we are averaging roughly 17 million searches a day right now (duckduckgo.com/traffic.html)
Google says they did 2 trillion searches last year[1], and while usually their search metrics include Youtube, Google Maps and Gmail queries let's assume it was all searches. That'd be roughly 5.5 billion searches a day.
So now we're talking ~1/322 or just shy of 40lbs. That's roughly the size of a Hamadryas baboon or about 22 Mallard ducks - not a bad little flock! :)
Disclaimer: DDG staff. Opinions are my own. No animals were harmed in the poor construction of this analogy.
[1]http://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trillio...
Powered By Reporting is listed as any search that is handled by Google or Bing. "Google’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at "Google entities", as well as searches on AOL and Ask’s MyWebSearch "[3]
In Comscores qSearch product that you can subscribe to, when you hit "Google Sites" it provides a drop down detailing the breakdown of all the properties. Search is hard to define when companies get to that size, and searches on other Google properties are indeed 'searches' but they are also different than searches on DuckDuckGo.
[2]http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases-... [3]http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/comScore-September-201...
Hey, it's just a metaphor.
Scales and ratios not needed.
edit: Wasn't meant to be negative ... as I could see myself writing something like that and my GF giggling at me for a week ...
> That was one of the most HN comments I've ever read.
What does this mean?
I don't think the correctness or incorrectness of the scale of the metaphor really changes the way the whole article reads. Yet it's the first discussion piece I see in the comments on HN, and that doesn't surprise me a bit.
That said, it's a known quirk of the site and not a problem in my mind. I don't hate the tendency even it does cause a regular eye roll from me.
Well played.
I regularly do this (to the frustration of those around me) and I think there is a strong correlation between enjoying hacker news and having this personality trait.
Okay, DDG is a hyena and not a mosquito. Great. Tell me how that changes the meaning of the article, or the strength of the facts used, or its conclusions, or the credibility of the author.
It means comments around here have a tendency to be overly pedantic and critical.
HN comments suffer from these and more.
What's this about a goose and a mosquito? What's that adding to the communication? Seems pretty irrelevant.
But the author said, specifically "I’m actually making things better", which isn't true.
Sometimes, taking the literal meaning might even distort the original message, like in this case changing the mosquito with a goose - if that had been the original expression, everyone would have wondered why the author chose such strange comparison.
I was going to suggest that a good author would then to choose an animal about the size of the goose that has the same characteristics as a mosquito, but why? A mosquito is considered annoying, harmful and parasitic – if it was the size of the goose, things to be very different. It would be considered a terrifying predator of the jungle. So I don't see what qualities of a mosquito would make it an appropriate choice, and this is what makes the metaphor worth correcting. It is somewhat of a slur against DDG, more so since the numbers are so dramatically inaccurate.
A good animal choose would be a… duck?
It's a metaphor. Not a fact.
English != Math :)
You know, that's just a gratuitous swipe. So was this in the blog post: "First, DuckDuckGo didn’t start as a nerd attempt to find the ultimate algorithm."
It really looks like you want to put down nerds to make yourself feel more sophisticated or popular. This isn't high school, though, and you're pissing in the same pool you're posting in. Turning "HN" into an adjective with a pejorative tone isn't going to win you any friends on HN, especially as a new poster. It's just mean spirited.
I don't notice people wearing both hats at the same time much.
Of course, the OP could be satire. When you can't tell the difference between satire and your platform, then ...
Incidentally, if we look sideways a bit the metaphor fits like: Google isn't just linearly bigger, it has nonlinear increases in advantages because of its size, clout, network effects, and so on. So the order of magnitude discrepancy is perhaps justified by attempting to account for these affects. Conversely, it could be suggesting that smaller disruptive and startups ought to spread their influence virally, parasitically, or through insect-like nimbleness and hatching-of-the-1000-eggs reproduction, instead of relying on slower, more "mammalian" reproduction to propagate their influence. Who knows? Hard to say which interpretation is correct, when words are ambiguous and one leaves it to the imagination. You can't even rely on Occam's razor to decide, since the shortest path between two thoughts differs depending on the mind. But maybe that's not a bad thing. Speech & language is nothing more than successful miscommunication. You can't police what you don't understand.
That would make this a bit of an ironic comment, no? :p
[0] http://www.metzerfarms.com/DuckBreedComparison.cfm the most common duck (mallard) is 0.72–1.58 kg, the most common farm duck is 2-2.5 kg, but certain breeds are close to the right interval.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heaviest_land_mammals
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4446112/search-for-inter...
[3] http://www.akc.org/content/dog-care/articles/breed-weight-ch...
Though looking at size, an african elephant is 4m tall, while a small mosquito is 2mm. this is a ratio of 2000:1.
In which case he would actually have been generous to DuckDuckGo while not being wrong by orders of magnitude.
Conclusion: OP meant linear size, not mass. He could have stated it explicitly though, because one would naturally think that he was referring to mass.
We also compare CPUs by die-area, not by their length or height.
Not really, but "exact same end result" is far from the current situation. And I'm not saying they shouldn't do it, rather that they really need to catch up.
Google (not counting other Alphabet companies) does a lots of things. I think the original analogy is mostly right.
My point can be rephrased as "given that the result is the same, do employee counts matter"? If not, then they don't matter in general.
It might tell us how realistic scaling to the size of Google is, for example. I don't think it does, but it's an interest thought: could DDG manage Google's search traffic with ~1,000 employees (scaling linearly)? Could it do the same with fewer than that?
the second one is doomed
Yeah, be really scared MSFT, two geeks from Stanford that wanted to sell for $800k are going to challenge you in the future.
A little (long-overdue) help from anti-trust authorities and Google might just have to watch out. After a while migration to another SE is logarithmic. https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html Google pays for a lot of its traffic, see Traffic Acquisition Costs, directly and indirectly.
Video if you're unable to visualise - https://youtu.be/o0u4M6vppCI?t=2m42s
Why would this guy go out of his way to say this metaphor is actually literally informative and generous towards DuckDuckGo while apparently having exerted no mental effort and being incorrect by orders of magnitude on his own data?
If you're most generous to the writer, you get 12 million hits /day vs 13 billion hits /day according to his data from Wolfram, for a ratio of ~1/1100, which applied to a pygmy elephant of 5500 lbs yields a corresponding weight of ~5 lbs for the mosquito, or over 2,000,000 mg, versus the average mosquito weight of about 5 mg. Even if he meant a small 2000 kilogram pygmy elephant and a 20mg elephant mosquito, he's still 5 orders of magnitude too generous towards Google in mass comparison in his metaphor in which he is "actually making things better for DuckDuckGo".
I think most people think of animals like African Elephants when they hear "elephant", though, in which case you're looking at a 13,000 pound animal versus a ~12 pound one if you use hits as your metric, or a ~95 lb one if you go by visits as your metric.
So an actually fair metaphor is if Google's an elephant, DuckDuckGo is somewhere between a goose and a hyena. Better watch out, Google.