Author Topic: DuckDuckGo - new search engine (Read 22717 times)

CWuestefeld · « **on:** April 14, 2010, 12:30 PM »

I recently happened upon a new search engine, DuckDuckGo.

It's not Google, but it does have some unique characteristics to recommend it. From their About page:

Zero-click info
Privacy kept
Search sites with !bang
Disambiguation pages
Info topic summaries
Less clutter
Less spam & ads
Shortcuts & other goodies
Category pages
Customization settings

I'm finding the zero-click information very useful for "what the heck is this" kinds of searches. And the disambiguation and category pages are nice as well. And their privacy policy is that they don't keep any of your personal history, period, which may appeal to those of you that sounded off in the "The More You Use Google, the More Google Knows about you" topic.

Here's a sample of their zero-click info thing. It looks like they try to find a hit in Wikipedia (and other sources?) and include a short clip from there directly into the results

DuckDuckGo - new search engine

Here's a sample disambiguation. If there are many clearly distinct meanings of a term (in my example, "python", it asks which sense you're interested in)

DuckDuckGo - new search engine

This is a start-up company, and the developer is very responsive to input.

Disclaimer: I have no association with DuckDuckGo, other than having corresponded with the developer over some suggestions.

sajman99 · « **Reply #1 on:** April 14, 2010, 01:29 PM »

DuckDuckGo seems pretty good to me.

I did a few searches for software mentioned in this forum, and the DC results were there. Same searches in Google produced no DC results.

But I sure hope the Aflac duck doesn't find out about this.

nudone · « **Reply #2 on:** April 14, 2010, 03:28 PM »

seems quite decent - worth a bit of testing. i like the context search options.

gexecuter · « **Reply #3 on:** April 14, 2010, 08:25 PM »

Hey this site is not so bad, i might use it. Oh and is the duck a friend of cody?

cranioscopical · « **Reply #4 on:** April 14, 2010, 08:31 PM »

Oh and is the duck a friend of cody?
-gexecuter (April 14, 2010, 08:25 PM)

Enough with these fowl wise-quacks!

mouser · « **Reply #5 on:** April 14, 2010, 09:23 PM »

i like the results, but i think that duck should get some glasses and make the result text a little more ~~uniform and~~ compact.. something about the way results are presented makes me feel like i have to do a little too much scrolling.

Lutz_ · « **Reply #6 on:** April 15, 2010, 12:25 AM »

Thanks for this tip! DuckDuck looks really good so far.

yksyks · « **Reply #7 on:** April 15, 2010, 01:03 AM »

... something about the way results are presented makes me feel like i have to do a little too much scrolling.
-mouser (April 14, 2010, 09:23 PM)

Try to set in the settings Width to "wide" and Size to "small".

allen · « **Reply #8 on:** April 21, 2010, 07:42 PM »

Since this post hit, I've been using duckduckgo as my primary search, on a trial basis--and I'm sold on it. I try every search engine that comes along, but this is the first one that's really drawn me away for more than a few hours. I absolutely love it. I still use google for deeper, more intense(ive) searches but for general queries, it's faster and far more to the point than google. Plus, keyboard support is excellent, !bang makes it easy to get out and the zero click / disambiguation features are brilliant.

It is exactly the opposite of that over-hyped, entirely useless cuil crap that claimed to be a google killer a year or two back.

kartal · « **Reply #9 on:** April 21, 2010, 07:58 PM »

The only real problem I have with this site is that it requires javascript and I hate to turn javascript in general

nudone · « **Reply #10 on:** April 22, 2010, 02:29 AM »

Since this post hit, I've been using duckduckgo as my primary search, on a trial basis--and I'm sold on it. I try every search engine that comes along, but this is the first one that's really drawn me away for more than a few hours. I absolutely love it. I still use google for deeper, more intense(ive) searches but for general queries, it's faster and far more to the point than google. Plus, keyboard support is excellent, !bang makes it easy to get out and the zero click / disambiguation features are brilliant.

It is exactly the opposite of that over-hyped, entirely useless cuil crap that claimed to be a google killer a year or two back.
-allen (April 21, 2010, 07:42 PM)

very interesting. (and good to see a post from allen.)

TucknDar · « **Reply #11 on:** April 22, 2010, 02:51 AM »

Nice find! I might start using this

Dormouse · « **Reply #12 on:** April 22, 2010, 06:56 AM »

I tried a search.

It came up with one result which was related to what I was looking for, but wasn't.

The second entry on the results page was a suggestion/link to try Google. I did, and Google came up with a page of the sorts of results I was looking for.

Lutz_ · « **Reply #13 on:** April 23, 2010, 01:32 AM »

Since you reminded me of Cuil, I had to try it again - an I like it. The search results very often more helpful than Google searches.

Since this post hit, I've been using duckduckgo as my primary search, on a trial basis--and I'm sold on it. I try every search engine that comes along, but this is the first one that's really drawn me away for more than a few hours. I absolutely love it. I still use google for deeper, more intense(ive) searches but for general queries, it's faster and far more to the point than google. Plus, keyboard support is excellent, !bang makes it easy to get out and the zero click / disambiguation features are brilliant.

It is exactly the opposite of that over-hyped, entirely useless cuil crap that claimed to be a google killer a year or two back.
-allen (April 21, 2010, 07:42 PM)

housetier · « **Reply #14 on:** May 07, 2010, 08:14 PM »

I have also used duckduckgo as my default search engine for a while now and am quite satisfied with it. I like it for not being google, bing or yahoo; I like the endless result page that keeps expanding.

Naturally it is different from google, but I find it more usable.

lanux128 · « **Reply #15 on:** May 07, 2010, 10:14 PM »

nice find, thanks CWuestefeld.

it works pretty well and i find myself using it more often nowadays. so much so that i've made a Farr alias for it.

ok, here is the alias (in zip format). to use the alias, unzip the file to your Farr Alias folder, might be something like this, C:\Program Files\DonationCoder\Farr\AliasGroups\Installed.

then from Farr, view the Options window and close so that Farr auto-detects the new alias. the search keyword is 'duk'.

edit: attached the alias file.

mouser · « **Reply #16 on:** May 07, 2010, 10:22 PM »

hey how about sharing that alias!!

lanux128 · « **Reply #17 on:** May 08, 2010, 01:18 AM »

hey how about sharing that alias!!
-mouser (May 07, 2010, 10:22 PM)

no problems, attached the zip in the earlier post. let me know if anything doesn't work..

Jammo the OrganizedFellow · « **Reply #18 on:** January 04, 2011, 04:27 PM »

Alias works fine!

Very handy to use, when I don't want to use Google.

lanux128 · « **Reply #19 on:** January 06, 2011, 06:34 AM »

Alias works fine!

Very handy to use, when I don't want to use Google.
-Jammo the OrganizedFellow (January 04, 2011, 04:27 PM)

glad you like it..

MilesAhead · « **Reply #20 on:** December 08, 2011, 03:14 PM »

I've been using it in my browser address bar search. I just noticed the "bang syntax" feature. Much more convenient that using "site:domain.com" and they seem to have accumulated quite a list of domains to work with it.

I like being able to look up a WinAPI call just by doing
!msdn FindFirstFile