How DuckDuckGo can be a hero
In Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout said, "Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect." So consider what's happening in the minds of everyone who has long depended on Google to be what it has always been—a search engine for the Web—when they consider what they're seeing from Google now, and reading in stories such as these:
- Google Search as You Know It is Over (TechCrunch)
- Google Shifts to AI Search, Heralding Major Change in How People Use the Internet (in Time)
- Is Google about to destroy the web? (BBC)
- The Death of Google Search (Impact Lab)
- Google Just Killed the Search Engine (in Banyan Hill)
- Google Has Abandoned What Made People Love Google (in How To Geek)
By forking itself away from search, Google is also forking over the Web—and creating a giant opening for somebody else to grab the Web search position.
Who would that be?
Microsoft's Bing is one candidate, but Bing's UI is a NASCAR of promotional jive. (See what Steve Jobs says about Microsoft here. Cuts like a scalpel.)
DuckDuckGo is the other. Its position is privacy. That's good, but search is better now, because the position is available. Google is obviously abandoning it. (Yes, they're keeping one foot on search as a base, but they'd rather be the leading AI company now. To make that shift, Google has deprecated Web search, and that fact is beyond obvious.)
DuckDuckGo already has a search engine for the Web. They can sharpen that position while keeping, or even expanding, the privacy one. And help save the Web in the process.
They can start by adding "Pure Web Search" to the top of the list of things DuckDuckGo does and Google doesn't. The list is at the bottom of DuckDuckGo's search home page.
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