DuckDuckGo is now my default search engine
I first heard about DuckDuckGo a few years ago. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that distinguishes itself from Google by not tracking it’s users and focusing on privacy. Over the past few years, I’ve gone through various phases of giving DuckDuckGo a try. But each time I reverted back to Google because of it’s better results.
That’s changed now. I decided to give DuckDuckGo another try a few months ago, and I’ve stuck with it. I’m using it on my iPhone, and both my work and home Macs. The quality of the search results has improved dramatically since I last used it. And they keep getting better. DuckDuckGo has a clean and simple interface, which is a refreshing contrast to the ever increasing clutter on Google.
For those of us located outside the U.S., DuckDuckGo’s search results can be further improved by setting the region to your country. The second thing to do is to learn how to use the !bang commands. These let you search directly on other websites — e.g. “!a whiskey” will search for “whiskey” on Amazon (if you have a region set it will automatically search on your local Amazon site). “!w Barack Obama” will search for “Barack Obama” on Wikipedia. If you have DuckDuckGo set up as your default search engine, the !bang commands will make it super quick for you to go directly to what you’re looking for. You can even use “!g” to search on Google (when you really have to).
Finally, Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s founder, has been responsive to tweets about switching to it. This is the icing on the cake. I want DuckDuckGo to succeed. We need a real alternative to Google (competition is good, monopolies are bad). It’s awesome to use an ambitious product that is built by such a small team (only around 30 people), who care so much about making it better.
