Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results citing Dutch court order

Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by Valakas_ on Thursday December 02, 2021 @08:36AM (#29415898)

DDG should change their name though. Seriously. Who wants to use such a ridiculous sounding search engine? AltaVista sounded good and had a meaning (seeing from above). Yahoo fine. Bing also ok. But duckduckgo seems like the most ridiculous name someone came up on a brainstorm meeting for search engine names. But then they did went with it.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by athenot on Thursday December 02, 2021 @10:03AM (#29416978)

They own duck.com and it redirects to their site. They should just adopt "duck.com" as their main brand, which will inevitably get shortened to "Duck" in everyday conversation.

Then we can turn it into a verb. "Go Duck <term>"

They could even capitalize on the famous autocorrect substitutions: "Need an answer? Duck it!"

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by R0b0t1 on Thursday December 02, 2021 @11:53AM (#29418700)

Are you telling me to go duck myself?

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by mrandish on Thursday December 02, 2021 @11:10AM (#29417987)

Wow. I did not know this. They should absolutely do as you suggest. Duck is a far better name.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by GordonS on Thursday December 02, 2021 @01:55PM (#29420683)

IIRC, Google actually owned duck.com until a few years back, when they voluntarily handed it over to DDG.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by Terretta on Friday December 03, 2021 @12:45AM (#29427003)

FWIW, because On2 aka Duck TrueMotion —> VP3-VP7

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by soylentcola on Thursday December 02, 2021 @11:29AM (#29418277)

I once worked with an "interesting" guy who had a tshirt that read "If you can't duck it, fuck it" over an image of a roll of duct tape.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by kolbe on Thursday December 02, 2021 @11:33AM (#29418353)

Unfortunately Apple's autocorrect has totally hijacked the meaning of "Go duck ___"

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by Griffinsauce on Thursday December 02, 2021 @09:21AM (#29416409)

100% agree. It is so obviously a huge impediment.

Weird names can be overcome (see "google"), but weird + clunky + needs to disrupt massive established players... what are they thinking?

At least lose the "Go".. DuckDuck we can work with.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by jdofaz on Thursday December 02, 2021 @09:54AM (#29416867)

They already own duck.com

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by Griffinsauce on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @01:35PM (#29488528)

Well that has terrible SEO.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by CountDrewku on Thursday December 02, 2021 @09:25AM (#29416476)

Nah HotBot and AskJeeves didn't have a problem back in the day. Google sounded just as ridiculous when it came out.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by m10i on Thursday December 02, 2021 @11:22AM (#29418171)

I'd argue that HotBot is a lot more catchy since 1) it rhymes, 2) it's shorter in length.

AskJeeves would also be abbreviated in conversation to just "Jeeves", which is definitely as the original creators intended. "DuckDuckGo" doesn't have these features going for it.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by iso1631 on Thursday December 02, 2021 @09:41AM (#29416685)

Dogpile

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by jachee on Thursday December 02, 2021 @10:06AM (#29417012)

Lycos.

Bing.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by Isthatablackgsd on Thursday December 02, 2021 @11:00AM (#29417812)

Excite.

AltaVista.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by adolph on Thursday December 02, 2021 @11:22AM (#29418169)

Veronica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by Fnoord on Thursday December 02, 2021 @10:35AM (#29417397)

With the blink of an 'y', Hotbot was one letter away from something completely different. Although the term NSFW was yet to be invented back then.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by soylentcola on Thursday December 02, 2021 @11:31AM (#29418320)

One of my first exposures to "typo squatting" was when I accidentally typed in "hotbat" in the early 2000's. It led to some generic porn site with a girl in a tight tshirt holding a baseball bat as a splash image. No other real connection to the name as far as I could tell. Just a run of the mill (for the time) paid porn site.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by iso1631 on Saturday December 04, 2021 @09:42AM (#29441100)

In another universe, search is run by Hotboy.com, with its hotmale.com email system

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by dqpb on Thursday December 02, 2021 @10:24AM (#29417223)

I agree, naming is very important. I once tried to have a conversation with a group of colleagues about Coq, and literally the conversation couldn’t move past the name. Now I just use TLA+ or Lean.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by skinkestek on Thursday December 02, 2021 @10:52AM (#29417656)

To me it seems search engines needs weird name.

Maybe I'm wrong and someone has a list of somewhat successful general search engine with a somewhat serious names besides Alta Vista (and I never thought about that before) and Fast?

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by excitom on Thursday December 02, 2021 @12:18PM (#29419128)

Frankly that was my reaction when I first heard of "google".

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by mikepurvis on Thursday December 02, 2021 @01:24PM (#29420175)

At least to most normal people "google" would have sounded like a silly, made up word. Or like, the most association it might have had would be to something like googley eyes.

DuckDuckGo has the disadvantage of not only sounding silly, but also being composed of silly-sounding real words. And not having a secret geeky meaning that people find out about and then feel like they're part of an elite club.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by Zenbit_UX on Thursday December 02, 2021 @05:44PM (#29423871)

This comment is so unrelatable to me, every kid over the age of 7 when I was in school knew what a google was or better yet, a googleplex. This was also in the 90s so it predates the search engines popularity by a good bit.

It was, simply put, the biggest named number anyone knew and was frequently used as such in arguments... e.g. I watched that movie 1000 times! Oh ya? Well I watched it a google times.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by post_from_work on Thursday December 02, 2021 @10:35PM (#29426362)

>>>every kid over the age of 7 when I was in school knew what a google was or better yet, a googleplex. This was also in the 90s so it predates the search engines popularity by a good bit.

Same here, as someone who was in high school in the late 90s and switched from AskJeeves/Yahoo/Altavista to Google around ~2000, part of the appeal was "Somebody named a search engine after the biggest number meme we know? AND it's fast? AND it gives good results? Lemme check this out..."

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by Terretta on Friday December 03, 2021 @12:51AM (#29427028)

googol = 10^100

// did that get auto-corrected? if so, ironic, as it’s said "Google" was an accidental misspelling of "googol" by Sean Anderson back in ‘97…

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by wcunning on Thursday December 02, 2021 @11:58AM (#29418772)

Last night, driving home through a not great part of Detroit at nearly 10:00pm, I saw a box truck with DDG advertising on all sides. I was amused by the dedication to offline advertising.

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Re:Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results cit... by bigyellow on Thursday December 02, 2021 @11:48AM (#29418623)

It's a ridiculous name because it's a ridiculous company. "Private" search engine, hosted on US-based Microsoft Azure servers? Give me a break, what a complete joke.

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