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.
