Duck Duck Go

As of January of 2011, I have been using Duck Duck Go as my primary search engine on all my computers. I tried it out because I was increasingly frustrated with Google's business decisions and wanted out, and I never really had the urge to switch back. It mainly seems to target people who are privacy-conscious.

The quality of the results really varies. The index is less complete so you might run into queries with very few results, and spam is more prominent for certain queries. There are, however, features that have become indispensible to me and compensate for the lower quality of search results.

Let's Start Off Easy: Backslash

Prepending any search query with a backslash will redirect you to whatever the top result is. This is effectively a textual "I'm Feeling Lucky". This sounds useless, but it saves you time if you are searching for something from your browser's search field and you are fairly certain what you want will be #1.

HTTPS Everywhere

You may have realized over time that most of my links to YouTube videos or to Wikipedia articles go to HTTPS versions. Some people told me they weren't even aware those sites had HTTPS versions until I linked them.

If a search result is on a site that also has an HTTPS version and you are using the HTTPS version of Duck Duck Go, it will rewrite the result to take you to the secure version of that page.

!bang Commands

!bang commands are keywords you can append to search queries to redirect them to other search engines. This is fairly similar to search keywords you might be used to in Chrome or Firefox, except they're consistent for everyone using DDG as their search, and there are a ton of them. It would take forever to configure all of those on your home computer. A few of the ones I use regularly:

• Wolfram Alpha: heterochromia scrabble score !wa
• YouTube: follow tomorrow iidx !yt
• Wikipedia: list of hidamari sketch episodes !w
• Veekun Pokédex: hydro cannon !veekun
• Apple Developer Docs: nsurlprotocol !cocoa
• Stack Overflow: kindle periodical format !so
• Denshi Jisho: yoroshiku !jisho
• And whenever search results are plain terrible and I need to borrow Google:
  • Scroogle for anonymized search: I am lonely will anyone speak to me !s
  • Google for plain old Google: do a barrel roll !g

Another nice twist: you can specify your region on a settings page and it will redirect you to the regional variant of whatever site you're !bang-ing.

!bang queries are probably 90% of my queries now. That is how little actual Web searching I do, and that is why I can live with the subpar search results.