Casey Liss lays out the reasons he chooses to use DuckDuckGo as his search engine.
“You should use DuckDuckGo”
Casey Liss lays out the reasons he chooses to use DuckDuckGo as his search engine.
Cool. I will give it another try…
I was using DuckDuckGo until I found StartPage.
Now I use StartPage, Google and DuckDuckGo. I find I use StartPage 98% of the time and Google almost the rest of the time and occasionally DuckDuckGo.
StartPage is “Enhanced by Google” but they don’t record any of your information. From StartPage:
“When you search with Startpage, we remove all identifying information from your query and submit it anonymously to Google ourselves. We get the results and return them to you in total privacy.
Your IP address is never recorded, your visit is not logged, and no tracking cookies are placed on your browser.”
While the “bang” operators are interesting, to be honest I really don’t want to have to remember a list of what abbreviations are for what website. I’ve got enough to remember already. So while cool, not really all that well implemented, IMHO.
If you type !(then first letter) it gives you a ton of options to click on and choose. I use !gi (google images) and !github constantly, if I’m lazy I can type !g and click on which one I want. !gi was the game changer for me, as I have to do a ton of image searches. I always wanted to use DDG, and now I can 🙂
That doesn’t work in your search bar in safari if you use DDG as default, there you have to memorize the sites (they all seem pretty straightforward), but like you mention, not for everyone.
Thanks for the link Jim – this is great!
I love DuckDuckGo… The results have really improved a lot in the last few months as well. Besides, with the powerful !bang operations (https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html) you can do encrypted google search by prepending or appending “!g” to your terms.
You can just do !i for image search too. 🙂 Here’s the full list: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
Also: It does work in my Safari bar on both Mac and iOS.
Thanks! That was terrible wording on my part – I changed the sentence. I meant the auto complete list of options doesn’t work in the safari bar.
!i is a good one, definitely going to have fun with this. I’ve wanted to switch over for years, glad they’re improving so much.
Ah! Gotcha. Yes, I’ve been so happy with their pace of improvement too. It’s amazing that I can usually type the “!” and whatever I want to search and it works MOST of the time.