Duckduckgo is a search engine much like google and it promises, as it says on its front page, that it will not store any personal information, follow you around with ads or track you while you browse but is it as good as google and does it need to be? Out of all the other search engines out there, this little pond dweller seems to be the only one that cares about preserving some form of privacy.
Duckduckgo's minimalist front page is very similar to what we would expect to see with google's so longtime users will feel right at home.
Usage
DDG sets itself apart from other search engines by avoiding the filtering of personalized search results and by delivering everyone the same results for a given search. DDG also tries to return the best results rather than the most results and let's face it who goes past the second page on google anyway? Under the bonnet those results come from over 400 sources such as Bing, Wikipedia, Yahoo, just to name a few.
DDG's traffic has sky rocketed over the last 4 years thanks largely due to the Snowden NSA revelations and but still pales in comparison to google's market share. The question remains though is that due to DDG's ability as a search engine or simply due to a lack of exposure with the main stream population? I think if more people new about DDG then more people would use it.
Money makes the world go round, how does DDG make it's money?
With two simple methods.
- Affiliate relationships with several companies
- Serving ads from the Yahoo–Bing search alliance network
Yeah but will it find my favourite pizza shop?
After using DDG as my primary search engine for the last couple of years I can safely say that it is like a fine wine, it gets better with age and while sometimes it can struggle with lesser known websites my overall experience has been an excellent one. I love how the searches scroll away into obscurity without having to click next page
and it has some amazing other features too like
!bangs commands. By typing ! followed by the website and search term you can instantly be taken to the search results on that website. For example if you typed !amazon shoes you will be taken to the amazon search results page for shoes. You can also abbreviate this to !a shoes and with over 9,249 bangs ranging from Multimedia to Translation you have never been closer to quick fast accurate searches on your favourite sites with minimal clicks.Other features include but not limited to are voice search, instant answers, tor hidden service, social media bio, random password generator, and the list goes on and on. These are all built into the search engine and are delivered by the instant answer mechanic. Another one of my favourites is the inbuilt link expander. If you are unsure why that is important see my blog post here where you can quickly see where a link is taking you by typing expand then the shortened link.
Where does the duck fail?
I think the duck fails in a few small areas and I found that I had to switch back to google for certain searches but this has greatly improved since the beginning of my story. The more and more I use DDG the less I need to use google.
Did you know about DDG? Have you used it? Do you intend to give a shot after reading this?
I would love to read you comments and experiences with DDG.
Till next time
Nex