Duck.com now points to DuckDuckGo, not Google
Non-tracking search engine, DuckDuckGo, is now a little easier to find online after the company acquired the premium generic domain name duck.com — thereby shaving a few letters off its usual URL. This means browsing to duck.com now automatically redirects to DuckDuckGo.com.
The twist in this tale is that duck.com's prior owner was Google. And DDG had accused the search giant of anti-competitive behavior — by pointing duck.com to its own search engine, Google.com, and thus "consistently" confusing DDG users (duck.co having long pointed to the DDG community page.)...
[...] [Calls] for antitrust scrutiny of tech giants have been rising in the US. And Google's dominant position in Internet search and smartphone platforms, along with its pincer grip (along with Facebook) on the online ad market, position it for some special attention on that front. So the company quietly passing off duck.com now — after using it to redirect to Google.com for close to a decade — to a pro-privacy search rival smacks of concern over competition optics, at the very least.
Also at Gizmodo.
Previously: Google Throws DuckDuckGo a Bone, Adds Redirect on duck.com Landing Page
Related Stories
Google owns Duck.com, but it'll give rival DuckDuckGo a shoutout anyhow
Google owns Duck.com, which has been driving rival search engine DuckDuckGo up the wall for over six years. Because when you type "duck.com" into a web browser, you get Google.com. Doesn't make a lot of sense, yes?
But after a new round of complaints this Friday, Google has relented. Google comms VP Rob Shilkin just
quackedtweeted that a new landing page will give people an opportunity to click from Duck.com straight through to DuckDuckGo. Or to the Wikipedia page for ducks, because that's only fair.
From on2.com:
Please note that On2 was previously called the Duck Corporation. So if you typed Duck.com, you are redirected to On2.com:
Related: DuckDuckGo Is Google's Tiniest Fiercest Competitor
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @03:33AM (9 children)
We're gonna need hamfisted regulation to make it work. We have to make the network ad hoc and P2P, and on a dumb pipe.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday December 14 2018, @03:43AM (6 children)
I modded you up.
If you're using your connection correctly, your ISP shouldn't have a clue what you're doing.
We need decentralized social media (which could broadly include forums) and information sharing. Plenty of options exist, but they could be better.
Even if speeds on the decentralized web platforms are in the toilet, that shouldn't matter if broadband connection speeds are increasing [soylentnews.org], bulk bandwidth is getting cheaper, new codecs are lowering the bandwidth needed for a given quality of video and VOIP, or if you are primarily using it to share text content anyway.
With bookmarks and other means to share and store addresses, you don't need to even look at domain names.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @03:57AM (4 children)
It's called USENET.
Well, I was social there.
Fine, just watch me post about this on my MySpace page!
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday December 14 2018, @02:00PM (3 children)
As mentioned in a four-year-old review by Alan Henry [lifehacker.com], major home ISPs no longer include access to Usenet in the basic subscription. It's an over-the-top paid add-on, much like Netflix or NYTimes. How many users do you think Facebook would have if Facebook charged a $7/mo subscription like NewsDemon [newsdemon.com] or even $10 per 25 GB like AstraWeb [astraweb.com]?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday December 14 2018, @06:24PM (2 children)
A shame that we allow that... Damn ISP should be a common carrier.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday December 14 2018, @07:10PM (1 child)
In the case of Usenet, it's not an issue of blocking, fast-laning, or zero rating a particular destination, which are the ISP behaviors commonly associated with the net neutrality debate. It's an issue of it costing money to run an NNTP server with decent retention. Your ISP will let you connect to any NNTP server you want, but it doesn't have to operate one itself, and operators of other NNTP servers are free to deny access to those who connect without valid credentials.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday December 14 2018, @07:57PM
Your ISP will let you connect to any NNTP server you want, but it doesn't have to operate one itself
And chances are they won't let you operate one either, it's like telling me I can't use a fax machine on my line, or an answering machine, remember those days? It's another reason we need to re-categorize them. What I do with my paid for bandwidth is not their business.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @08:28PM
Dat and ipfs both look promising.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @08:23PM (1 child)
You mean something like what these guys are doing? https://handshake.org/ [handshake.org]
In related news, they just donated a cool million dollars to the FSF. https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1-million-from-handshake [fsf.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @05:30PM
Not sure how well that will work when ISPs start to whitelist the sites you can visit and the protocols you're permitted to use. The main issue is service provision without established, entrenched providers. The whole thing has to be decentralized, not just the name servers and content.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @03:46AM (1 child)
No good deed goes unpunished.
Yes, there were probably cynical reasons that the
don't be evilcompany did this, but they finally did. If we want big corps and the rich dick head CEO types to do decent things, we need to reward them when they do things we like. Or, at least, not deride them for doing the right thing, even if for the wrong reasons.Good google pat,pat, pat.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 14 2018, @03:50AM
Cynical for sure, but as the article notes, Google has antitrust issues in the EU (the fines that Google pays have their own line item in the GOOG financial results), and their CEO appeared before Congress this week.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday December 14 2018, @08:24AM (11 children)
Optics [wikipedia.org]. The branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light.
Optics. The plural of a particular form of liquid dispenser user to dispense measured quantities of alcoholic spirits. [wikipedia.org]
It has not historically been a synonym for appearances. But as Wikipedia says "In Public relations, how something will be perceived".
There are other perfectly good words that could have been used - any thesaurus will give quite a choice.
I'm just being old and grumpy. I'm old enough to see how language is changing in my lifetime. There are so many things that young people just simply don't get. One thing I do notice is that vocabulary does enlarge - as a youngster, I found Shakespeare impenetrable, but now, while not exactly completely fluent, I understand far more of the unusual words he used. The same goes for Victorian and Edwardian slang. I didn't live in either of those eras, but lists of slang terms presented as weird are usually mostly known by me - simply from reading a lot over the years. So I don't object strongly to neologisms, but as in the case of optics, I'm not keen on existing words that have precise meanings being appropriated and used outside of their field, especially there are scads, loads, bucketfuls, even oodles of other choices.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday December 14 2018, @10:18AM
Blockquoting the context wouldn't have helped.
I... (shudder)... had to read the entire FS to get to it and make sense of your terse comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 14 2018, @12:10PM (1 child)
Running Summ.ly...
Analyzing comment...
Summary produced. Output:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday December 14 2018, @10:36PM
Summ.ly is correct.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Friday December 14 2018, @03:42PM (1 child)
I literally died when I read this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @07:23PM
Are you a full time zombie now or another part time one?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheFool on Friday December 14 2018, @04:00PM (5 children)
Optics is also the plural of "optic", which is a slightly more generic term for a lens. It's not a synonym for appearance, but for something that changes perception (and thus perceived appearance).
I don't like language abuse either, but I do think it does work in this case even if it's a bit whimsical. They are worried about the perception of the company, and with the way people get whipped up into mobs easily these days, it seems appropriate to take up an industry term for the small number of lenses the mobs are seeing you through. The PR's job is to "correct" this with another abstract lens, like you would bad eyesight. So you've got at least two lenses. A set of optics.
It's important to note that they aren't worried about whether the company actually is any of the things it's perceived as being, either. That's the second, more sinister meaning there. They view corporate abuse something they can "correct" for, now that the companies are too huge and abstract to really grasp fully.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday December 14 2018, @11:45PM (4 children)
I don't like it because the word was clearly abused for this meaning by some uneducated "journalist" and spread through the media community, like many, many other victims of the English language. Instead of reaching for a thesaurus, people experience recency bias and propagate these usages of the word due to exposure to crappy modern media and popular culture. I don't care that you could construct a contrived explanation for its new meaning.
Our words have a long, noble history that can often be traced back millennia. I hate that this is getting stomped on by some asshole trying to fill out their article quota for the month picking a random word that is in any way slightly related to the concept he is trying to express. I get that language is organic. New words have been created for historically important reasons: to describe new concepts and technologies, to avoid bans, in response to significant historic events. I don't want our words to have a footnote: "this meaning emerged because some asshole in the 21st century couldn't bother to spend an extra five seconds thinking of the correct word to use."
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(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:08AM (3 children)
Sorry, but nope. The word wasn't "abused," nor is this a particularly novel usage. A few quick searches could have told you this usage is over 40 years old, seemingly promoted by (if not originating within) the Carter Administration.
As for the rest of your rant, I too used to be an angry pedant. Then I started reading actual scholarly works on the history of English usage. And then I realized that for every legitimate point the pedants have about supposed neologisms or bad usage or imprecise language, they also believe 10 other things that are utter BS, generally supposed "rules" created out of nothing by some idiot pedant decades or centuries ago who just didn't like how something sounded to him and simply declared standard English usage of the time to be "wrong."
Since then, I've come to the opinion that pedantry likely abuses and perverts language as much as (if not more than) it protects it.
I'll not defend this meaning of "optics," but neither am I bothered by it. As others have pointed out, it's a reasonable figurative extension of traditional meanings.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday December 15 2018, @02:15PM (1 child)
Oddly enough, in general I agree with you. What gets my goat is people appropriating precise technical terms and using them in contexts that detract from the technical meaning. Where you can't find a word that means what you want to say (thesauruses* can be helpful here) a short descriptive phrase or a neologism is fine. Mugging an existing word and making it less precise riles me. I agree with people who say that the point of language is to communicate: and therefore, imprecision in language hinders communication, so deliberate introduction of imprecision is to be avoided. Obviously opinions differ in this regard and it is fruitless arguing over the point: a case of de gustibus non est disputandum [wikipedia.org].
*Some might say thesauri, but unfortunately my Latin is not good enough guaranteed to correctly decline a second declension noun that originates from the Greek θησαυρός. It used to be a mark of learning to sprinkle your writings with grammatically correct Greek and Latin; but getting it wrong is a terrible faux pas; and many authorities now will opine that using an Anglo-Saxon plural is perfectly acceptable - so the plural of octopus can be octopuses, rather than octopodes (or even ὀκτώπόδες ); and the plural of virus can be viruses.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday December 15 2018, @02:21PM
not good enough guaranteed to correctly decline
The above was an error in editing. It should read: "not good enough to guarantee correctly to decline" or "not good enough to guarantee declining correctly"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday December 16 2018, @10:07PM
40 years is a short time. A large proportion of words can be traced back to Latin or further, and have served their purposes well. I agree with pTamok, if there is already a word for the precise concept you're trying to express, using a word that does not describe that concept and beating it in with the power of mass media is a disservice to the English language. We already have lots of words with colorful but precise semantics forming a vibrant and useful language, these abuses instead dilute and cloud the meanings of words, making the language muddy and less useful.
Those "rules" created out of nothing mostly made the language more precise and thus useful, or simplified needless complexity. Those rules may have been arbitrary, but they served an important purpose, that *some one* pick *some way* of clarifying the language where confusing ambiguity existed, and that role naturally falls to the "idiot pedant" who cares about language than the everyone who doesn't care, despite benefiting from a tool of communication honed by "idiot pedants". That doesn't mean that "idiot pedants" are never wrong, just that they are motivated by a love for language that most people don't have.
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