I expected something harsher given the title of the post. I agreed with virtually everything tferris wrote.
tferris took time, energy and effort to elaborate on some of the things that caused him to view ddg as an inferior product. I don't think that's "vitriol", I think it's constructive criticism. When I think of vitriol, I think of people being mean for meanness's sake (which sadly does happen on HN sometimes).
I have much broader concerns about DDG, but if Gabriel thought what tferris wrote is vitriolic, there's virtually no chance he'd appreciate my point of view.
There were comments in that thread that were less constructive. This one for example, strikes me as particularly aimless in its hatred: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4021828.
I never meant to sound hateful. As a matter of fact I absolutely don't "hate" DuckDuckGo --actually I seriously considered switching at some point, out of privacy concerns, and eventually decided against it, for 3 reasons, the main of which being the UI and graphic identity. Besides, I feel a lot of sympathy for people like you --I know what it is to be a startup taking on an established behemoth.
But that's the thing with criticism done over the Internet: readers will tend to lend the worse intentions to the poster, an effect that is multiplied when the reader is also the target. Had I written this criticism in an email to you instead of a HN thread, I would have sugar-coated it in order to be listened. There is no better way to have your opinion ignored than to make it sound as an attack on your audience's identity.
Still: do consider a rebranding of your product. The best niche to start from if your are a search engine is probably the niche of top hackers, rather than middle-aged women. Mainstream markets are conquered by starting with the knowledgeable power users for the kind of product you're building (PG has said that quite a few times I believe). If your name & graphic identity are disliked by a significant proportions of people on HN, it's a sign something is wrong.
I have to disagree. I'm not a fan of the name and branding either, but DDG's value proposition - zero personal info collection - trumps all that by a mile. So much so that I've been using DDG as my default search for almost a year. Judging from the other comments I'm far from the only one.
I suspect DDG has enough "top hackers" for whom the aesthetics are a secondary issue using it already that making inroads with a more mainstream audience like middle-aged women has much more business value.
Having said that, it would be nice to have named it something that can be used as a verb. Note to self, something to consider when naming my next projects.
> Still: do consider a rebranding of your product. The best niche to start from ... it's a sign something is wrong.
Considering a rebranding is fine, agreed... but jumping to rebranding based on what a single niche (i.e., "top hackers") thinks is not.
To me, it sounds like the problem is NOT the branding; a lot of sites started out with ugly UIs (e.g., Amazon, Google, Facebook), and I happen to think the little duck is kinda charming. Unless you're 1-800-GOT-JUNK, it's highly unlikely that your name or logo will make or break your success.
It sounds like part of the problem is that GW hasn't targeted the right niche yet for DDG.
I don't think top hackers are the right people to target.
To say top hackers are the "knowledgeable power users" of search engines is to say top hackers are the KPUs of all web-based services: just because you can program it doesn't mean you're the market for it. Search power users could be SEO and PPC gurus, researchers, even admin assistants --- people who spend boatloads of time every day using search engines and getting frustrated, not thinking about how they're built or algorithms.
The good news is that my most serious concern is, to a large degree, inside baseball.
My most serious concern is that I can't quite bring myself to believe that a VC-backed company, founded by the creator of a classmates.com style company actually cares about privacy in any meaningful way. My perception of your values erodes any potential trust; it feels like a gimmick to get innovators and early adopters to use it. This also destroys your most obvious value proposition.
My weaker concerns are centered more around design (a lot of awkward and modestly confusing pieces that others have identified), and results that were never noticeably better than Google for me, but were sometimes noticeably worse.
I really hope you take my stated concerns in the right spirit. I know it's not nice to have some stranger you've never met say he doesn't trust you because of his perception of your past work, and his concerns about likely business models. That's why I waited until after the holiday to respond, so at least there wouldn't be tons of people reading the thread when I said it.
I don't think that's "vitriol", I think it's constructive criticism.if Gabriel thought what tferris wrote is vitriolic, there's virtually no chance he'd appreciate my point of view.
The problem is: I can't see you. Without visual cues, poor writing sounds violent. Quadruply so when only using bulleted lists. (Hint: email someone and list their faults in a bulleted list. Then have them do the same to you.) Would you say to Gabriel's face, "You have a crappy logo. And your domain name is too long. Plus, I could sleaze a four letter domain name out from under somebody else. Why can't you? You must be pretty incompetent. Your product is awkward and you don't even live in san francisco. Why won't you just go away?"
That's what the comments sounded like to me.
You have no right to be heard. Constructive criticism is criticism without temper and a slight acknowledgement you appreciate being listened to at all: "Hey Gabe, I was thinking about duckduckgo and had some feedback about things that feel off to me. Maybe you'll find my opinions useful. I think the duck logo is kinda strange. It looks too duck-rapey to me. Your center aligned results are a little quirky (everybody else is 'more left'), but I like the inline favicons. I used to think the auto-wikipedia results were distracting, but google started polluting its results with much worse things now, so you were ahead of the curve there. The name always trips me up too -- maybe spinning off an alternatively-branded domain name could make it better? At least your name isn't as tragic as blekko. Thanks for listening."
True, that's why we must assume good faith when reading what others write. One will be right more than one is wrong and learn more than one would ever otherwise.
tferris took time, energy and effort to elaborate on some of the things that caused him to view ddg as an inferior product. I don't think that's "vitriol", I think it's constructive criticism. When I think of vitriol, I think of people being mean for meanness's sake (which sadly does happen on HN sometimes).
I have much broader concerns about DDG, but if Gabriel thought what tferris wrote is vitriolic, there's virtually no chance he'd appreciate my point of view.