I don't see how you can legitimately make a claim on a generic name. I also don't see how this is a monopoly issue. It is a trademark issue, which doesn't have much likelihood of winning.
I think i'm gonna start my own search engine called searchsearchfind and than complain about CBS's search.com monopoly.
I don't think he is making any such claim. Like I mentioned elsewhere, if you follow his full explanation, it is Google that is actually capitalising on this confusion and redirecting users to their own engine.
The confusion (if it really exists) has nothing to do with Google. It has to do with DDG not protecting their turf. When they chose their name, they could have chosen thousands of others. This isn't and shouldn't be Google's problem and quite frankly comes off as a weakness that DDG ran with this story.
Google should legitimately not sell it to me, though it would have been of course nice to do so when I first asked in 2010. I think an appropriate remedy would be to either point it nowhere, point it to the original page it had been pointed to for many years, or point it to the acquisition page (as http://on2.com still does) -- all things they do in other cases if you look at past acquisitions.
Effectively it is Google's fault because they are doing it now specifically in his case and not for others (as he mentions clearly)
Secondly, while it would be nice to pre-empt all angles and all possibilities etc., etc., but I don't think any of us can foresee every possible way something will come back to bite your backside in the future. So, no, I don't think that it is somehow DDG's fault that they did not foresee this and preempt it.
P.S: FWIW, google renamed themselves from googol to google because the VC mispelled their name on the cheque. Just goes to show that such things are a fact of life. People have every right to vaguely try to look up "Duck something" search engine. However, Google is definitely in the wrong for sneakily redirecting users back to their own engine in this case by misusing this vagueness.
Comments
I don't see how you can legitimately make a claim on a generic name. I also don't see how this is a monopoly issue. It is a trademark issue, which doesn't have much likelihood of winning. I think i'm gonna start my own search engine called searchsearchfind and than complain about CBS's search.com monopoly.
I don't think he is making any such claim. Like I mentioned elsewhere, if you follow his full explanation, it is Google that is actually capitalising on this confusion and redirecting users to their own engine.
The confusion (if it really exists) has nothing to do with Google. It has to do with DDG not protecting their turf. When they chose their name, they could have chosen thousands of others. This isn't and shouldn't be Google's problem and quite frankly comes off as a weakness that DDG ran with this story.
If you read @yegge's response (I reproduced it here)
This only started happening after I asked about the domain name. It used to point to a history page about Duck Corporation (previous name of On2 -- http://web.archive.org/web/20100802014055/http://duck.com/), similar to http://www.on2.com/, which was acquired by Google in the same acquisition.
Google should legitimately not sell it to me, though it would have been of course nice to do so when I first asked in 2010. I think an appropriate remedy would be to either point it nowhere, point it to the original page it had been pointed to for many years, or point it to the acquisition page (as http://on2.com still does) -- all things they do in other cases if you look at past acquisitions.
Effectively it is Google's fault because they are doing it now specifically in his case and not for others (as he mentions clearly)
Secondly, while it would be nice to pre-empt all angles and all possibilities etc., etc., but I don't think any of us can foresee every possible way something will come back to bite your backside in the future. So, no, I don't think that it is somehow DDG's fault that they did not foresee this and preempt it.
P.S: FWIW, google renamed themselves from googol to google because the VC mispelled their name on the cheque. Just goes to show that such things are a fact of life. People have every right to vaguely try to look up "Duck something" search engine. However, Google is definitely in the wrong for sneakily redirecting users back to their own engine in this case by misusing this vagueness.
[moved to correct place]