"Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a mosquito (this is not to emphasize; I’m actually making things better for DuckDuckGo)."
Why would this guy go out of his way to say this metaphor is actually literally informative and generous towards DuckDuckGo while apparently having exerted no mental effort and being incorrect by orders of magnitude on his own data?
If you're most generous to the writer, you get 12 million hits /day vs 13 billion hits /day according to his data from Wolfram, for a ratio of ~1/1100, which applied to a pygmy elephant of 5500 lbs yields a corresponding weight of ~5 lbs for the mosquito, or over 2,000,000 mg, versus the average mosquito weight of about 5 mg. Even if he meant a small 2000 kilogram pygmy elephant and a 20mg elephant mosquito, he's still 5 orders of magnitude too generous towards Google in mass comparison in his metaphor in which he is "actually making things better for DuckDuckGo".
I think most people think of animals like African Elephants when they hear "elephant", though, in which case you're looking at a 13,000 pound animal versus a ~12 pound one if you use hits as your metric, or a ~95 lb one if you go by visits as your metric.
So an actually fair metaphor is if Google's an elephant, DuckDuckGo is somewhere between a goose and a hyena. Better watch out, Google.
If you'd like to go by searches rather than visits:
At DuckDuckGo we are averaging roughly 17 million searches a day right now (duckduckgo.com/traffic.html)
Google says they did 2 trillion searches last year[1], and while usually their search metrics include Youtube, Google Maps and Gmail queries let's assume it was all searches. That'd be roughly 5.5 billion searches a day.
So now we're talking ~1/322 or just shy of 40lbs. That's roughly the size of a Hamadryas baboon or about 22 Mallard ducks - not a bad little flock! :)
Disclaimer: DDG staff. Opinions are my own. No animals were harmed in the poor construction of this analogy.
Since when search metrics include YT, Maps and... Gmail?!? Unless you're talking about universal search results, I've never seen the numbers for all those products conflated.
If you look at the most recently public posted qSearch report on Feb 2016[2] you'll notice it talks about "Explicit Core Search" and "Powered By Reporting."
Powered By Reporting is listed as any search that is handled by Google or Bing. "Google’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at "Google entities", as well as searches on AOL and Ask’s MyWebSearch "[3]
In Comscores qSearch product that you can subscribe to, when you hit "Google Sites" it provides a drop down detailing the breakdown of all the properties. Search is hard to define when companies get to that size, and searches on other Google properties are indeed 'searches' but they are also different than searches on DuckDuckGo.
Those are third-party numbers. The "trillions" statement came from Google, where nobody conflates searches on Gmail with those on Web search. Your original message implied that Google inflates search numbers; I'll only say that that's a major assumption to make. (I used to know the exact numbers.)
I agree with parent, it's not just a metaphor but a wildly inaccurate guess that makes the reader think duckduckgo is more irrelevant than it really is.
> That was one of the most HN comments I've ever read.
HN has a reputation among some[who?][weasel words] as a place where many commenters are some combination of pedantic, overly literal and out of touch with mainstream culture. Taking this metaphor to pieces would seem to check the first 2 boxes pretty neatly.
You actually make it sound bad. I would more likely to say they are precise and usually won't allow for inaccurate information to fly through the front page without pointing out the issues.
Let me use another metaphor to describe why some of us more "common folk" roll our eyes when we see objections like this prominent in the comments: while HN doesn't seem to miss the forest for the trees, it often seems as or more interested in focusing on a few individual trees than discussing the forest.
I don't think the correctness or incorrectness of the scale of the metaphor really changes the way the whole article reads. Yet it's the first discussion piece I see in the comments on HN, and that doesn't surprise me a bit.
That said, it's a known quirk of the site and not a problem in my mind. I don't hate the tendency even it does cause a regular eye roll from me.
There is definitely a culture of contrarianism on HN; there is a tendency for some users here to play devil's advocate or just argue against the logic of any article for the sake of feeling superior or clever. I'll probably get downvoted for this comment, but doesn't change the reality. And most of us are probably guilty of blending in with that culture here occasionally, while others seem to thrive on it.
I think they mean the tendency to take a statement and apply maths or logic to show that it is incorrect (or less frequently, correct).
I regularly do this (to the frustration of those around me) and I think there is a strong correlation between enjoying hacker news and having this personality trait.
No, the point is not simply using math to show something is wrong. It's using math to show something that doesn't need to be 100% correct to convey the desired meaning is wrong. It's pedantry to the point of wondering if the person responding has ever actually had a conversation with a human being that didn't involve a keyboard. If someone hears an elephant/mosquito metaphor in this context and starts doing math instead of simply taking it for what it is - a hyperbolic way of saying "this thing is really, really big/impressive/well-funded/whatever, and this other thing is... the opposite," that's a level of social awkwardness and borderline autism that is simply unnecessary in any discussion.
Okay, DDG is a hyena and not a mosquito. Great. Tell me how that changes the meaning of the article, or the strength of the facts used, or its conclusions, or the credibility of the author.
"I found a small detail in an irrelevant anecdote that is wrong (or more likely, that I misunderstood completely), therefore your entire argument is suspect and you're bad and you should feel bad."
HN comments have a tendency to obsess about almost irrelevant details. Exact, precise dictionary definitions of words clearly being used in context to mean something not exact matching the dictionary. Arguments over whether passing a pointer counts as pass by value or pass by reference. Taking metaphors and going off on numerical tangents that don't add anything to the meaning or discussion.
Let's take a look here. The message being communicated was "google is much much larger than duckduckgo". Metaphor used carried that information. Communication achieved.
What's this about a goose and a mosquito? What's that adding to the communication? Seems pretty irrelevant.
I think it adds a lot. Comparing an elephant and a mosquito makes it seem like the mosquito is almost non-existent. A goose compared to an elephant is much more significant. A goose can stand up to an elephant. [1]
LOL - in a metaphorical / rhetorical contest, yes, the difference is irrelevant. What matters is the sense of overwhelming difference between the elephant and <insert most common animals or insects>.
In this context — absolutely.
Alas, the worrying trend I see more and more lately that people start to have trouble seeing context of anything. Sometimes it can be amusing, sometimes it looks dangerous.
The author went out of his way to say that the scale of the metaphor was wrong. I don't find it that pedantic for someone to point out that the opposite is true, especially when it makes a huge difference to the reader understanding the scale of DuckDuckGo's accomplishments.
But doing that doesn't necessarily involves calculating a precise measurement of the ratios present in the metaphor. Human language conveys lots of meaning by evocative imaginery, too, so not all expressions should be taken literally.
Sometimes, taking the literal meaning might even distort the original message, like in this case changing the mosquito with a goose - if that had been the original expression, everyone would have wondered why the author chose such strange comparison.
The calculations were necessary to determine and illustrate how inaccurate and distorting the original version is. The size of the animals is being used to show sizes of companies, since everyone is generally familiar with the sizes of mosquitoes, geese and elephants. But the difference between a mosquito and a goose is drastic… handily, someone else already did the calculations to show how drastic. So, it is a bad original metaphor and it is misleading.
I was going to suggest that a good author would then to choose an animal about the size of the goose that has the same characteristics as a mosquito, but why? A mosquito is considered annoying, harmful and parasitic – if it was the size of the goose, things to be very different. It would be considered a terrifying predator of the jungle. So I don't see what qualities of a mosquito would make it an appropriate choice, and this is what makes the metaphor worth correcting. It is somewhat of a slur against DDG, more so since the numbers are so dramatically inaccurate.
But if there ever a place to be correct in what you say both factually and mathematically and then not be ridiculed for it, it's here. I support the parent argument.
>" That was one of the most HN comments I've ever read."
You know, that's just a gratuitous swipe. So was this in the blog post: "First, DuckDuckGo didn’t start as a nerd attempt to find the ultimate algorithm."
It really looks like you want to put down nerds to make yourself feel more sophisticated or popular. This isn't high school, though, and you're pissing in the same pool you're posting in. Turning "HN" into an adjective with a pejorative tone isn't going to win you any friends on HN, especially as a new poster. It's just mean spirited.
I find it funny that engineers ( on HN ? ) put on their I'm-a-rigid-logic-thinking-only-engineer cap when it suits them, and their I'm-an-imaginative-open-eyed-creative-rebel cap when it suits them as well. Traits of the first cap include: can't think outside the exact parameters given them, can't 'fill in the blanks' or inference laterally, take words and numbers to be exact limiting things. Traits of the second cap are basically the opposite of these, we can fill in the blanks, and so on.
I don't notice people wearing both hats at the same time much.
Of course, the OP could be satire. When you can't tell the difference between satire and your platform, then ...
Incidentally, if we look sideways a bit the metaphor fits like: Google isn't just linearly bigger, it has nonlinear increases in advantages because of its size, clout, network effects, and so on. So the order of magnitude discrepancy is perhaps justified by attempting to account for these affects. Conversely, it could be suggesting that smaller disruptive and startups ought to spread their influence virally, parasitically, or through insect-like nimbleness and hatching-of-the-1000-eggs reproduction, instead of relying on slower, more "mammalian" reproduction to propagate their influence. Who knows? Hard to say which interpretation is correct, when words are ambiguous and one leaves it to the imagination. You can't even rely on Occam's razor to decide, since the shortest path between two thoughts differs depending on the mind. But maybe that's not a bad thing. Speech & language is nothing more than successful miscommunication. You can't police what you don't understand.
Maybe he didn't mean the metaphor was the problem, but the sentence following it (about making things look better for ddg)? Depending on interpretation, that could be undue discredit to ddg...
That would make this a bit of an ironic comment, no? :p
Depends on which species [0]. Elephants weight 3500-5900 kg[1], devide both numbers by 1100 to get 3.18-5.36 kg (7-11.8 pounds) and you have a simple interval-overlap search problem[2]. For example with dogs[3] the answer is a Japanese Chin[4]. So it should be "Google would be an elephant while DuckDuckGo is a ~~chihuahua~~ very small dog".
I did a quick search comparing the mass of a mallard to a Canadian goose (default options returned for 'weight of duck' and 'weight of goose'). A large mallard on avg is about 3.5 lbs, and a small Canadian goose on average is about 7.1 lbs. In this case, yes! Two ducks == 1 goose.
Exactly. Most people, when thinking about the relative size of animals, evaluate the 2-dimensional area of those animals. We certainly don't tend to consider mass, weight, or even volume. So the metaphor as originally given (mosquito vs elephant) works well.
In which case he would actually have been generous to DuckDuckGo while not being wrong by orders of magnitude.
Conclusion: OP meant linear size, not mass. He could have stated it explicitly though, because one would naturally think that he was referring to mass.
Great analysis. Still I see two problems. First, the company name Google comes from "Googol" and so it cannot be overestimated and second, why are you mixing lbs and kilogram in your analysis!? And using lbs is in general uglier than the wrong metaphor ;)
Perhaps rather than thinking in terms of material mass, he was thinking in terms of subjective conceptual 'weight' of each in the minds of his audience. Mosquitos are annoying and can be quite dangerous due to carrying parasites and pathogens, so the 'weight' we give them in the messy associative matrix of our brains is far larger than their raw mass. In other words: maybe he didn't mean it precisely.
I know you kind of overdid it a bit, but that's exactly the kind of stuff that distracts me for an hour, because I have to do the same math you did. Nicely done and good to see that DuckDuckGo is already a hyena, rather than a mosquito.
Or to put it in Edward Tuft's "Lie Factor" terms using a 5000 lbs elephant and 5mg mosquito I get a lie factor of 454046 (if someone can check out the math).
Not really, but "exact same end result" is far from the current situation. And I'm not saying they shouldn't do it, rather that they really need to catch up.
Google (not counting other Alphabet companies) does a lots of things. I think the original analogy is mostly right.
It might tell us how realistic scaling to the size of Google is, for example. I don't think it does, but it's an interest thought: could DDG manage Google's search traffic with ~1,000 employees (scaling linearly)? Could it do the same with fewer than that?
A very small part of Google employees actually work on search. If google were to sell everything but the search division, they'd be a small company. The ad business and infrastructure are used by search but not the product.
Yeah, be really scared MSFT, two geeks from Stanford that wanted to sell for $800k are going to challenge you in the future.
A little (long-overdue) help from anti-trust authorities and Google might just have to watch out. After a while migration to another SE is logarithmic. https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html Google pays for a lot of its traffic, see Traffic Acquisition Costs, directly and indirectly.
Why would this guy go out of his way to say this metaphor is actually literally informative and generous towards DuckDuckGo while apparently having exerted no mental effort and being incorrect by orders of magnitude on his own data?
If you're most generous to the writer, you get 12 million hits /day vs 13 billion hits /day according to his data from Wolfram, for a ratio of ~1/1100, which applied to a pygmy elephant of 5500 lbs yields a corresponding weight of ~5 lbs for the mosquito, or over 2,000,000 mg, versus the average mosquito weight of about 5 mg. Even if he meant a small 2000 kilogram pygmy elephant and a 20mg elephant mosquito, he's still 5 orders of magnitude too generous towards Google in mass comparison in his metaphor in which he is "actually making things better for DuckDuckGo".
I think most people think of animals like African Elephants when they hear "elephant", though, in which case you're looking at a 13,000 pound animal versus a ~12 pound one if you use hits as your metric, or a ~95 lb one if you go by visits as your metric.
So an actually fair metaphor is if Google's an elephant, DuckDuckGo is somewhere between a goose and a hyena. Better watch out, Google.