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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: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday July 24 2018, @03:44AM (1 child)
I'm not sure you want to follow the "trademark violation" line of thought; the lineage of the duck.com is far older than DuckDuckGo, and Google bought On2 Technologies/Duck Corporation only a year or so after DuckDuckGo was founded, so Google arguably has a much stronger claim on the duck.com domain, to say nothing of the fact that duck.com is generic enough that DuckDuckGo has no better claim to it than PetSmart does.
Furthermore, Google never branded itself as duck.com; it just owned the domain and redirected it to their main page, which is standard practice for domain ownership. If hypothetically this issue were taken to court, DuckDuckGo would certainly lose, if the case wasn't dropped outright.
> After all, if DDG owned owned goog.com and directed it to duckduckgo.com; google would be all over them; and right fully so.
That would only be a problem if DDG also branded themselves as goog.com, and it's not really a fair comparison, since Google could make an offer for the domain that DDG couldn't refuse.
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(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday July 27 2018, @09:29PM
"Furthermore, Google never branded itself as duck.com; it just owned the domain and redirected it to their main page, which is standard practice for domain ownership."
Right. If I as PepsiCo just 'owned' the 'cokeisit' domain and redirected it to my main page, that would be grounds for a trademark suit.
"If hypothetically this issue were taken to court, DuckDuckGo would certainly lose, if the case wasn't dropped outright."
To me the only question is that 'duck' is quite generic, and perhaps not close enough to 'duckduckgo'; and 'duck' isn't especially strongly associated with duckduckgo.
Like if cocacola picked up the "fido" domain and redirected it to sprite. Would pepsico(7up) be able to argue that it's infringement on their trademarked fido dido character. Its a similar case, the trademark is fido dido, not just fido, and fido by itself is quite generic and associated with a cellphone network, and is even a generic term for dog, etc. But ultimatety I think a court would probalby side with pepsi on this, because coke using 'fido' to promote sprite is pretty sketchy... even if Coke aquired the fido brand/domain in relation to a bottle cap manufacturer or something. If it still went to to a bottle cap manufacturing division that would be ok, but if they folded it down, and redirected it to sprite products... that's not ok.
Likewise, google acquiring and owning duck is perfectly innocent, but pointint it at the google search engine,... that's a bit dodgy. Maybe not dodgy enough for ddg to prevail in court, but dodgy enough that it looks sketchy even if its deemed not illegal.