The DuckDuckGo

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying out various search engines to avoid being consumed by The Google. DuckDuckGo’s initial appeal for me was that it doesn’t track me, but over time, I grew fond of the way it displays results and some of the rando cool features.

DuckDuckGo feels similar to Google in many ways. If you go to duckduckgo.com, you’ll see a big ol’ search box laid out almost exactly like Google. Shocking. It also has suggested search terms as you type. Boring. Let’s move on to the good stuff.

Disclaimer: I’ve customized it from the defaults a bit including an alternate color scheme and the display of a Web of Trust icon (pretty cool).

Search results

It’s a search engine, so let’s look at what happens when searching for  something. Here’s an example of a search for chewy.

At first glance it looks pretty standard. If you look closely at the results, you’ll see they’re rather rich. The tabs at the top (Meanings, Images, etc) change depending on the search.

Before going on about those, let’s look at the results. I like that the results are pretty clear as to what is an ad, what is an “Official site” (will show later) and which sites are trusted via the Web of Trust. Another bonus with the results is the very clear indicator of which results I’ve visted already.

Back to the to top tabs! (Meanings, Images, etc) They’re rather nifty. Looking at the meanings tab, you’ll see a variety of potential meanings listed. Some are rather interesting or unexpected.

Here’s what the images tab looks like:

This works just like Google’s so I’ll skip the details on it.

Recipes, though, was a super unexpected section. It has an images-like layout of all sorts of chewy recipes.

I noticed the grid icon on the right of the recipes view. It does this:

Omnom. And if I click on a recipe, I get some rather interesting information about it.

Super cool. Moving on. There’s also a definition tab which shows exactly what you would expect.

Now, let’s search for something else. wordpress will do.

Note the Official site tag. Pretty cool. Even cooler is the About pane showing a summary of what the product is and some information about it on the right. It even shows the licesne.

Same rando cool stuff it does

DuckDuckGo also has a bunch of cool things built in. I suspect I’ve only just scratched the surface of what it can do.

Color schemes

It has color schemes. One of them matches my Unity theme almost perfectly. goHere’s the default:

There are other settings you can change as well including layout changes, specific color changes, which information is displayed for results and a few others.

Brilliant logo

The longer I use it, the more I love that bizarre duck. It’s so dang thrilled to go get some results.

Look at that lovable face! (hover over it for bonus fun)

Neato integrations

There are all sorts of tricks it can do. The first one I discovered was when I was searching for a color picker for Linux. It opens a nice color picker right in the browser. Here are a few I really liked. (I’m sure there are a ton I’m not aware of.)

Rando terminal version

If this doesn’t sell you on it, I don’t know what will.

Anyway

I’m not being sponsored by this or anything. I just thought I’d share the quirky little duck of a search engine.