Mar 10, 2008 DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is the Internet privacy company that lets you take control of your information, without any tradeoffs. We believe the. This subreddit is for news, updates, and discussion about the search engine DuckDuckGo. Read This First. Since we are a privacy-dedicated search engine that does not collect or share personal information, we receive lots of questions about privacy.
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that offers quite a few useful features for web searchers: add-ons, streamlined shortcuts, and 'zero-click info,' i.e., instant answers dependent on the nature of the search query. Here are ten different things you might not know you could accomplish with DuckDuckGo, anything from a stopwatch to discovering movies with Chuck Norris (yes, really!)
DuckDuckGo - What Is It and What Can You Do With It?
DuckDuckGo is a great search engine that delivers effective, fast, relevant results, and is especially attractive if you're keeping track of how information is gathered about you online.
DuckDuckGo offers a few features that are worth a second look for the savvy web searcher. For example:
- DuckDuckGo's results pages are not paginated, making it easy to scroll down and find what you're looking for quickly.
- Favicons (the small images that show up in the address bar, unique to each site) are displayed next to search results for instant recognition of your favorite sites.
- Instant answers called 'zero-click info' show up delineated by a red outline at the top of your results, depending on what your search query is.
DuckDuckGo gives searchers the ability to search within any site, using either the drop-down menu next to the main search box, or the 'bang' search shortcut (an exclamation point used in tandem with the name of the website). There are hundreds of DuckDuckGo bang shortcuts, covering a wide multitude of sites varying in topics from Research to Entertainment.
In addition to the shortcuts given above, DuckDuckGo offers what they call goodies, an intriguing array of all kinds of search shortcuts, anything from special keyboard shortcuts to specialized cheat sheets.
DuckDuckGo and Privacy
Here's more about their increasingly more popular stance on privacy:
'DuckDuckGo prevents search leakage by default. Instead, when you click on a link on our site, we route (redirect) that request in such a way so that it does not send your search terms to other sites. The other sites will still know that you visited them, but they will not know what search you entered beforehand . . . DuckDuckGo takes the approach to not collect any personal information. The decisions of whether and how to comply with law enforcement requests, whether and how to anonymize data, and how to best protect your information from hackers are out of our hands. Your search history is safe with us because it cannot be tied to you in any way.'
Privacy is becoming more of an issue for many people as the internet continues to evolve. If you are concerned with privacy and you enjoy a simple, uncluttered interface with plenty of shortcuts, then DuckDuckGo would probably be a good choice for you as a search engine.
Stopwatch
Need to time something—a cooking turkey, how long it takes you to finish that spreadsheet, maybe do a few laps? You can do that with DuckDuckGo; simply type 'stopwatch' into the search bar and you're good to go (literally).
Quick Word Definitions
Quick dictionary definitions are only two words away with DuckDuckGo; just type 'define' plus the word you're searching for, and instant definitions will be returned to you.
Find Information About Your Favorite Movie
Sure, you can find information about movies, simply by typing in the name of your favorite film. However, perhaps you want to find a movie that includes a particular actor or director. Just type 'movies with Chuck Norris' or 'movies directed by Mike Nichols' and you'll get a list of instant answers.
Get a Quick Weather Report
Local weather or weather halfway around the world, either way, you'll be able to find it easily. The search engine automatically determines where you are located for the local weather; if you're looking for weather in another town, city, or country, simply type the place name and weather and don't worry about punctuation; i.e., 'Chicago Illinois weather.'
Search for Your Favorite Music
DuckDuckGo gives searchers the ability to search within SoundCloud, an online streaming music service, for virtually any musical artist. Just type in what you're looking for plus the word 'soundcloud,' i.e., 'daft punk soundcloud,' and start listening.
Find Your Favorite Recipe
Need to impress someone with your culinary skills? Try looking for recipes with ingredients you already have on hand. For example: 'salmon recipes,' or 'quinoa recipes,' or 'Christmas recipes.' All come back with impressive results.
Convert Something Easily
Need to figure out ounces to grams, feet to yards, or inches to centimeters? Type in what you'd like to convert and DuckDuckGo will automatically calculate that for you. Example: '8oz to grams'.
Local Attractions
![Duck Duck Go Duck Duck Go](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125752127/579313068.png)
Whether you're looking for something in your local area that you haven't tried yet, or you're in a new city and you're unfamiliar with what's available, this particular feature can come in handy. Remember, this search engine automatically picks up where you are located, so if you want to find restaurants in your area, just type in 'restaurants near me.' 'bars near me,' etc.
Find an Image
DuckDuckGo promises web searchers that it will not collect, store, or share personal information, and it goes to great lengths to back up those promises. In fact, one of the most popular features are their privacy settings—they don't keep track of what you're searching for. This can come in particularly handy if you're looking for saucy images like 'images of cats wearing sweaters.'
Find a Video
There are literally millions of videos on the web, and it can get somewhat overwhelming when you try to search for something specific. DuckDuckGo tries to limit that frustration by providing quick shortcuts to popular video searches; i.e., 'jimmy fallon videos.'
In an update to the chromium engine, which underpins Google’s popular Chrome browser, the search giant has quietly updated the lists of default search engines it offers per market — expanding the choice of search product users can pick from in markets around the world.
Most notably it has expanded search engine lists to include pro-privacy rivals in more than 60 markets globally.
The changes, which appear to have been pushed out with the Chromium 73 stable release yesterday, come at a time when Google is facing rising privacy and antitrust scrutiny and accusations of market distorting behavior at home and abroad.
Many governments are now actively questioning how competition policy needs to be updated to rein in platform power and help smaller technology innovators get out from under the tech giant shadow.
But in a note about the changes to chromium’s default search engine lists on an GitHub instance, Google software engineer Orin Jaworski merely writes that the list of search engine references per country is being “completely replaced based on new usage statistics” from “recently collected data.”
The per country search engine choices appear to loosely line up with top-four market share.
The greatest beneficiary of the update appears to be pro-privacy Google rival, DuckDuckGo, which is now being offered as an option in more than 60 markets, per the GitHub instance.
Previously DDG was not offered as an option at all.
Another pro-privacy search rivals, French search engine Qwant, has also been added as a new option — though only in its home market, France.
DDG has been added in Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brunei, Bolivia, Brazil, Belize, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Germany, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Faroe Islands, Finland, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, India, Iceland, Italy, Jamaica, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Moldova, Macedonia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Paraguay, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, El Salvador, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, Switzerland, U.K., Uruguay, U.S. and Venezuela.
“We’re glad that Google has recognized the importance of offering consumers a private search option,” DuckDuckGo founder Gabe Weinberg told us when approached for comment about the change.
DDG has been growing steadily for years, and has also recently taken outside investment to scale its efforts to capitalize on growing international appetite for pro-privacy products.
Interestingly, the chromium GitHub instance is dated December 2018 — which appears to be around the time when Google (finally) passed the Duck.com domain to DuckDuckGo, after holding onto the domain and pointing it to Google.com for years.
We asked Google for comment on the timing of its changes to search engine options in chromium. At the time of writing the search giant had not responded.
Reached for comment on being added as an option in its home market, Qwant co-founder Eric Leandri said “thank you” to Google for adding the search engine as an option in France, claiming “certainly it’s because of the number of users of Qwant” in its home market.
But he added that Qwant still recommends to its users that they use Mozilla’s Firefox browser or the pro-privacy Brave browser.
He also said it would have been nicer if Google had also added Qwant in Germany and Italy where he said the search engine also has a following.
Asked whether he believes expanded search engine options in Chrome will be enough to stave off further regulatory intervention related to Google’s market dominance, Leandri said no — pointing out that Android OEMs still have to pay Google to install a non-Google search engine by default, following the European Commission’s Android antitrust ruling last year, as we’ve reported previously.
“It’s a joke,” he added. “But thank you again for Chrome 73, I really and sincerely appreciate [it]. I still recommend Firefox and Brave.”
This report was updated with comment from Qwant