Technology Tuesday: 30 Days with DuckDuckGo

I honestly can’t remember having a default search engine prior to Google. Sure, I searched plenty, but it was a random mix of AltaVista, Webcrawler, Lycos, Yahoo or whatever search utility my internet provider baked onto their homepage. Then, along came Google, and like many people, I can’t really imagine searching on anything else by default.

But…

A handful of things have been bothering my lately with Google searches. Primarily bothersome, are Google’s insistence at using my location and prior search history for serving me up a majority of results: even when sometimes they are not appropriate or germane to my search.

Also, paradoxically, I find that searching for technical terms (error messages, software instructions, computer related items for example) bring up the least helpful results in Google as one could imagine. Often times, the #1 result is from something that was written over five years ago. Stale, stale, stale!

And finally, the most maddening of all, is simply getting served a page with nothing more than link farms.

I had resigned myself to the fact that there was simply no better alternative and that Google was the lesser of all search evils. But I started making a handful of searches with DuckDuckGo and was pleased with the results. But, Google searched by default from my Chrome browser’s OmniBar, and it was tough to conscientiously remember to head to a search page (who does that anymore?) to really gauge how well DuckDuckGo could stand up as an everyday, default search utility.

So, I swapped up my default search in the OmniBar to DuckDuckGo where I handle 95% + of all my searches. I did this about a month ago. This week we’ll look at this search newcomer and some personal thoughts on using DDG as a primary search engine.

I’ll give you my bottom line first: I LOVE DuckDuckGO!

Search results are relevant, timely, fresh and delivered in an easy to read, clutter-free layout, with the same speed that you’d expect from Google. Often times, relevant data is served up via a partnership with Wolfram-Alpha or other sources like Wikipedia in a no-click info box at the top of the page.

Default Search

In order to really give another search engine a fair shake, it’s best to change it as the default search choice. This is super easy with most browsers. Just Google DuckDuckGo specific steps for your browser.

For Chrome: Simply perform at least one search with DDG. Then,
1 – Put the cursor over the address bar & right click. You’ll see a few choices, select “edit search engines”

2 – Scroll down under “other search engines” and find DuckDuckGo and hover over it. There will be a button that says “make default”. Click that.

Now, when you search from the OmniBar, you will be searching with DDG.

But why bother switching from Google?

I’m about as far from a tinfoil hat wearing privacy obsessed person as there can be. Yet, some of Google’s tracking is disruptive to relevant results. Why? Because as you search, your results become more and more tailored to past searches and your Google history. Sure, you can sign out of your Google account and perform your search, but that becomes disruptive to every day web use and GMail, Google Reader, Google Voice, Documents or any other Google service you happen to want to use.

Here’s an illustration of the “Filter Bubble” by DuckDuckGo: Don’t Bubble Us and an informative TED talk on the subject.< Often times, you are getting a narrow swatch of results based on your history...with potentially relevant results buried deep into result pages. (Does anyone go beyond the first, perhaps second page anyway?) DuckDuckGo has the best privacy policy possible for a search engine: Zero collection or sharing of personal information. I like this approach and find it refreshing. Take a quick look at why you may care: Don’t Track Us

Disambiguation Links

Ya know how Wikipedia has a convenient page header sometimes with disambiguation links? DDG does the same and it totally rocks. I’ve saved a lot of time being able to quickly select the proper item of interest without having to weed through results. Sometimes, you can drill even further down on these links, for example, I expanded my “Boston” search to the “Music” category and was offered the following:

[Disambiguation Links on DuckDuckGo]

!Bang

DDG has a cool syntax with literally thousands of what they call !Bangs.

  • Most big sites work, e.g. !youtube
  • Most generic keywords work too, e.g. !images
  • There are also shorter versions, e.g. !g (google) !i (images) !yt (youtube)

Full list of available !Bang operators. You may ask, isn’t it just as easy to head to YouTube and search there? Again, if you have DDG as your default search, and keyboard shortcut up to address bar, a quick !yt search saves a few seconds, and is grossly convenient. I have fallen in love with many of these shortcuts and use them daily.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Remember when it was easy to navigate results on the keyboard with Google? Not so much anymore. Seems like they’ve gone out of their way to prohibit keyboard use. If you are like me, and love the speed and convenience of remembering a few keyboard shortcuts, and enjoy the time savings, you will love DuckDuckGo: it was made for keyboard jockeys! A handful of the many shortcuts:

  • Enter go to result
    Note: use right away to go to first result.
  • Ctrl/Cmd+Enter  — open in background
  • ↓ or j  — next result
  • ↑ or k  — prev result
  • / or h  — go to search box
  • esc  — get out of search box

Relevant Results

The results are, as I said, high quality, relevant and particularly good at avoiding spam and ads. Not often have I had to resort to a different search utility and come up dry with results. Though, if I do, I simply !g from the address bar to check Google results.

Where DuckDuckGo does not have the best results is if you are looking for news and/or live time results. In the event I need results on something happening live, I will either !news for a Google News search or !twitter for a Twitter search. Similarly, Images are not a strength of DDG either and I will usually have to !images.

Clutter Free and Streamlined

You might recall one day, eons ago, where Google served relevant search results only. (Or for that matter, Bing or Yahoo!) Now, everyone uses your cookies and history and displays ads and links to make money from you. DDG eschews this approach (remember: they share nothing of your clicks with anyone and collect no data) for a clean, clutter-free results page. There is typically one small ad in the far right column.

Here’s a results page for searching “Phish”. Note the zero-click info box on top, relevant result links, and other suggested serach ideas.

[DuckDuckGo Search results page]

Other Cool Things

  • Plenty of settings to play with to customize the colors and look of the results page to suit your preference.
  • Ability to force HTTPS for all searches
  • Ability to turn OFF privacy settings if you do want to share click-info with sites
  • A developer that actually seems to care and listen to users

Bottom Line Again

Fantastic alternative to your current search default whether it be Google, Yahoo, Bing or any of the rest. Give it a shot for 30 days or so like I did. It may be awkward at first…as you may be ingrained with what you are using now, but after a little bit of time, you may just find that you have a new favorite search site like I do.

___________________________________________

Hidden Track Technology Tuesday
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