The majority of non-techie people I recommend DDG to literally LOL and give me the stop-shitting-me look.
I can't send a link to DDG to professional colleagues.
I've helped friends get their browsers more secure, etc. and they'll leave everything else alone but switch search because they think duckduckgo is some kind of "virus". (I explain it at the time, but it's too much to remember evidently.)
They really screwed up with the name, in my opinion as a regular user. It's also not short or memorable. I just don't get it. Seems like one of those inside jokes that only a founder finds funny and gets changed quickly before going to market.
Your industry colleagues haven't been inoculated against name-chauvinism by the relentless parade including "Google," "Yahoo," the innumerable "-Fish" and "-Monkey" names, etc.?
While I agree that it's not short, I disagree that it is not memorable. I've not had difficulty in remembering the name nor its association with a search service that is privacy focused, perhaps in part because of its awkward length. Are we perhaps using different definitions for "memorable"?
duck.com pointing to google.com is as if Microsoft had mac.com pointing up to microsoft.com and claiming it didn't matter because "It's called a Macintosh, not a Mac!"
This is more than a coincidence. on2.com is not pointing at google.com
AI file that as other of google dick moves, like with the maps article yesterday.
Personally, I got the message and does my best to not use their stuff. Cant afford it. At best unreliable/untrustworthy, at worst actively planning to do evil in the future.
Firstly it's completely false that you can't set DDG as the search engine in Android Chrome. I just did it. Here's how:
1. You visit DuckDuckGo in mobile Chrome.
2. Instructions from DDG pop up on the screen telling you how to find the default search engine picker screen (you click settings, and search engine is the first setting on the screen, so this is not hard).
3. DDG is now an option I can pick under the "recently visited" section, which is clearly visible on screen.
The search engine screen has Bing, Ask Jeeves and a few others pre-bundled, so perhaps they're salty because they aren't pre-bundled. Or perhaps the current behaviour wasn't always true in the past. But even if that was the case, it's fine today, so why are they complaining?
As for owning duck.com what a stupid complaint. DDG chose an awkward name for their search engine and own the domain name for it. They are not called and do not own the name "duck". If they want a short single word .com domain they can always rebrand. Google owns lots of random seeming domain names, but there's nothing wrong with that.