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Google, Which Owns Duck.com, Confuses Users Searching For Its Rival DuckDuckGo and Redirects Them Back To Google (twitter.com)

Posted by msmash on from the don't-be-evil dept.

Commenting on the record $5 billion fine on Google by the European Commission, privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo said this week it welcomes the decision as it has "felt [Google's] effects first hand for many years and has led directly to us having less market share on Android vs iOS and in general mobile vs desktop." The company said: Up until just last year, it was impossible to add DuckDuckGo to Chrome on Android, and it is still impossible on Chrome on iOS. We are also not included in the default list of search options like we are in Safari, even though we are among the top search engines in many countries. The Google search widget is featured prominently on most Android builds and is impossible to change the search provider. For a long time it was also impossible to even remove this widget without installing a launcher that effectively changed the whole way the OS works. Their anti-competitive search behavior isn't limited to Android. Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they'd like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension. Google also owns http://duck.com and points it directly at Google search, which consistently confuses DuckDuckGo users. "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is google," wrote security researcher Mikko Hypponen, summing up the story.

Update: Google makes amends.

5 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Partly their own fault by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm not sure what you're talking about. DDG looks closer to Bind, Ask or Startpage than Google. And Google looks pretty similar to all of them (although distinctive from all of them a little bit.)

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    Your ad here. Ask me how!
  2. Same Old News Slashdot by mydots · · Score: 5, Informative

    I explained this one years ago here
    https://slashdot.org/comments....

    Obviously they don't care to undo my changes from when they bought On2/Duck.

    1. Re:Same Old News Slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Here is the post for reference:
      ----------
      by mydots ( 1598073 ) on Friday November 23, 2012 @01:21PM (#42074845)
      ----------
      I started working at The Duck Corporation (duck.com) in 1996, a few years before it went public as On2 Technologies/The Duck Corporation (on2.com and duck.com), and was working with Google/Duck/On2 until a year and a few months after the acquisition in 2010. At Duck/On2, I was responsibile for everything related to building our networks and maintaining all the hardware, software, servers, domains, networks and a ton of other stuff, you know the typical system administrator job.

      Prior to the acquisition, but after going public as On2, we likely didn't sell duck.com because that was still my primary email address and I and a few others still actively used it, and we still kept up a basic website for information about our old and basically no longer supported software; and it was just one of those things still tied to the company with a lot of history as The Duck Corporation, so we decided to keep it. Feel free to blame me, since I always requested that we keep it when we saw the many offers for the domain over the years, mostly in the hundreds to couple of thousand dollar range; and because of my history with the company, I am sure I was a big part of that decision to not sell it.

      When Google bought us, I knew I was still going to be there for a while to make sure all our company data, and some specific services that had to stay up, was migrated into their servers. Since we hosted all our own servers with our own hardware and software and they had to ulimately be shut down, I had to get things moved over and still needed to get my duck.com email.

      So at that point, since I was still getting a lot of duck.com emails and had my duck.com email address for literally many hundreds of websites, publications, mailing lists, business contacts and other things, since I mainly used duck.com for well over a decade, I wanted to make sure Google's DNS and email was configured to still get duck.com emails. I actually had started trying to switch all my duck.com to google.com, but it was an overwhelming process. I still wonder how much email is still going to my duck.com email address.

      I took it upon myself to learn the Google way of configuring their public DNS, email and a bunch of other things because I was nosey and wanted to learn and did learn some really cool and interesting stuff about them while I was there. I made sure the MX record for duck.com was still configured to deliver my email (and a few other email addresses) to my Google email account. Since it was decided to no longer keep the website up, I can't give you a real explanation, but I ended up configuring duck.com websites to point to the google.com main page instead of nothing. So you can go ahead and blame me, but no one at Google specifically told me to point duck.com to their site.

      ----------

  3. Re:hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Duck.com redirects to Google because it was a byproduct of the purchase of On2 Technologies (VP# video codecs). On2 Technologies was formerly called the Duck Corporation."
    https://www.quora.com/Why-can-Google-continue-to-redirect-duck-com-to-google-com-when-it-is-so-close-to-duckduckgo-com
    http://web.archive.org/web/20040824015111/http://www.duck.com/

    (That's also mentioned in TFA: "Yes, duck.com came as an asset in the unrelated On2 acquisition (On2 used to be known as Duck Corp).")

  4. Re:hmm by mydots · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, see my explanation.

    https://slashdot.org/comments....

    I also commented below about this being old news.