news Confirmed: Duck.com Transfers to DuckDuckGo

There may be surprising story hidden under the duckdesk.
Who knows, tomorrow we all listen that google has acquired duckduckgo.com........Just a thought...

It is pretty great.

DuckDuckGo can get a shorter domain.

Duck also has a double-meaning, i.e. don't be noticed.

So, people can "Duck" instead of "Google". Of course it sounds a little funny if you "Just Duck It".

The story of Microsoft floating a significant loan to Apple in order to keep Apple solvent in the late '90's is well-known. Microsoft didn't do so out of altruistic impulse; they did so to decrease the odds they'd be the target of anti-trust legislation. I'm sure the c-suite at Google is very aware of that history lesson, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more likely anti-trust target than Google. Alphabet was a proactive effort to stay ahead of that curve. This is another. It's also why I suspect they either gifted Duckduckgo the domain, or sold it at a modest price. Even if they squeezed Duckduckgo for every penny they could and maximized the duck.com sale price, that's a penny in the couch for Google, and of insignificant benefit, compared to the license to print money that they maintain as a monolith.

A recent TechCrunch article mentions and links to this thread on Namepros.....According to the article they speculate this may have to do with the anti competitive allegations directed to Google.... . Is this Google trying to save face? .....hmmmmm

I would immediately rebrand to duck.com and forward duckduckgo to duck.com

While I was at it I would drop the ridiculous logo and use something that better indicates sidestepping, offering choice, or ducking out of a service. In other words some sort of a privacy logo.

Good luck DuckDuckGo

AGAME said:

Interesting history... Some years ago Gabriel created "The Parked Domains Project", along with a firefox add-on, at his now-defunct ivegotafang (.com). [1] where he curated a list of 50+ million parked domains. He coded his search engine to explicitly avoid all of those parked domains. [2]

While I fully understand, and agree, with his stance on privacy these days, where was the respect for parked domain owners when he crawled these domains and blacklisted them and refused to display them in his search engine results?

Click to expand...

I don't think people using search engines are interested in parking pages or pages with poor or no contents.

Just when you begin to think Google completely forgot their "Don't be evil" mantra! lol

Really curious about the price, terms .. and even more about the contact/discussions/negotiations both between the two parties and specifically internally at Google!

Ironic link:
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393

I hope duckduckgo makes an email service out of it as well, I'd love to have an @duck.com

guillon said:

Did he also make an offer to the registry for .DUCK domain names ? The holder is Johnson Shareholdings, Inc. and has only 8 domains created? Note that it is a Trademark. More here: nic.duck

Click to expand...

.duck ?
duck.duck

duck yeah!

But when was the last time Google returned a parked page to you ?
The way I see it, if you park a name you are going to rely on type-in and residual traffic, not search engine referrals. Or you develop your domains and they will rank in search engines.
There is a choice to be made, and the vast majority of domains are not parking-worthy anyway.

I have been working on some kind of search engine project, for sure I wouldn't show parked pages or I would rank them very low. If people don't find relevant content, they will stop using the service.
Spam is what killed Altavista.

Internet.Domains said:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/12/duck-com-now-points-to-duckduckgo-not-google/

Click to expand...

Two more:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/12/18137369/duckduckgo-duck-com-google-acquisition

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18663860

HotKey said:

.
How is it Google just "nicely" handed over an ultra-premium domain to one of its competitors..hmm.

Click to expand...

Thats the million dollar question. Being in the IT business and working for one of the big tech firms I can say without hesitation that these companies rarely due much to help out one another. (wish I could go into more detail)........... When they do "help" it must be questioned.

Thelma said:

The story of Microsoft floating a significant loan to Apple in order to keep Apple solvent in the late '90's is well-known. Microsoft didn't do so out of altruistic impulse; they did so to decrease the odds they'd be the target of anti-trust legislation. I'm sure the c-suite at Google is very aware of that history lesson, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more likely anti-trust target than Google. Alphabet was a proactive effort to stay ahead of that curve. This is another. It's also why I suspect they either gifted Duckduckgo the domain, or sold it at a modest price. Even if they squeezed Duckduckgo for every penny they could and maximized the duck.com sale price, that's a penny in the couch for Google, and of insignificant benefit, compared to the license to print money that they maintain as a monolith.

Click to expand...

You might be right about the anti trust angle. I can't imagine Google giving up a good asset to a competitor for any other reason.

Duck.com can actually compete with Google. Imagine the marketing possibilities of "the Duck" or "duck it".

...and it doesn't sound stupid, like Bing.

James Iles said:

Recently, Jamie Zoch (@Yofie) questioned whether search engine DuckDuckGo had acquired the Duck.com domain name from Google.

Click to expand...

Did he also make an offer to the registry for .DUCK domain names ? The holder is Johnson Shareholdings, Inc. and has only 8 domains created? Note that it is a Trademark. More here: http://webwhois.nic.duck

Wow!

Didn’t expect this. I can’t wait for a follow-up on this one!

Hello Google, give them a new logo as well.

Kate said:

The way I see it, if you park a name you are going to rely on type-in and residual traffic, not search engine referrals. Or you develop your domains and they will rank in search engines.

Click to expand...

This!

Keeping both SEO and name domains portfolio, i used to park both types at Parkingcrew, and in my stats i see clearly only SEO domains still bring some revenue - residual traffic, as you said. Recently i shifted all my names parking to Undev as i don't care bothering with those cents they bring anymore. At least parking pages at Undev look million time more trustful, and i already started to get much more offers.

Sorry for the thread derail, i know it is about Duck Duck, not about parking...

Smiles76 said:

Customers don't use sites just because they have a cool catchy name.

Click to expand...

cars.com
is an example of a site that does nothing particularly well and never has but has tons of traffic because of the name.

This example is repeated many times where a solid domain name gets traffic even though the site is mediocre.

duck.com will my favor searchengine website

Well, it's about time. Always wondered when DDG would get themselves a shorter domain. Now we just need Gabriel to start using it as primary, rather than the forwarder. He would have to rebrand, but well worth it imo.
How is it Google just "nicely" handed over an ultra-premium domain to one of its competitors..hmm.

Thelma said:

The story of Microsoft floating a significant loan to Apple in order to keep Apple solvent in the late '90's is well-known. Microsoft didn't do so out of altruistic impulse; they did so to decrease the odds they'd be the target of anti-trust legislation. I'm sure the c-suite at Google is very aware of that history lesson, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more likely anti-trust target than Google. Alphabet was a proactive effort to stay ahead of that curve. This is another. It's also why I suspect they either gifted Duckduckgo the domain, or sold it at a modest price. Even if they squeezed Duckduckgo for every penny they could and maximized the duck.com sale price, that's a penny in the couch for Google, and of insignificant benefit, compared to the license to print money that they maintain as a monolith.

Click to expand...

This. Very good for google if they can point to a modestly successful competitor besides bing. It's been quite a while since 'do no evil' guided Google. I still use and like many of their products, but I dont believe for a second that this was lending a hand.

Interesting history... Some years ago Gabriel created "The Parked Domains Project", along with a firefox add-on, at his now-defunct ivegotafang (.com). [1] where he curated a list of 50+ million parked domains. He coded his search engine to explicitly avoid all of those parked domains. [2]

While I fully understand, and agree, with his stance on privacy these days, where was the respect for parked domain owners when he crawled these domains and blacklisted them and refused to display them in his search engine results? That rubbed me the wrong way. So if you were into parking back then, which many of us were, people who used his search engine never saw your ads and you likely lost some revenue due to his actions. Have no idea why he had this thing against parked domains but he created an entire project around it.

I agree with AuctionBio - there is probably more to this story... Its perplexing, though, why a privacy activist would get involved with Google unless it was purely just a domain sale. Time will tell.