I’ve been DuckDuckGo-ing!
A while back I decided to use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, not so much out of concerns of Google turning into SkyNET any day, but rather out of curiosity about the alternative search engine. I will admit that the design of DuckDuckGo also appealed to me, harkening back to days of yore when Google offered a much more uncluttered and streamlined web search experience. Something I do miss.
If you are using any other language than English, at least in my humble experience, you are in for a bit of a bumpy ride on DuckDuckGo. While it sometimes give you a decent suggestion, it more often just directs you to something completely unrelated, often on Wikipedia. The further away from English you move, it seems like DuckDuckGo has more problems getting things right, which is something Google primarily has a lot less of an issue with. Due to this limitations I find myself returning to Google’s search whenever I need to look something up in Swedish, which I wish I could have done just as easily in DuckDuckGo instead.
Leaving the wish for better functionality when searching in non-English languages, there are some very nice and compelling reasons to use DuckDuckGo as ones main search engine. The best part is by far the much more accurate search results, compared to Google and Bing at least. While Google tends to do ok for the most part, I find that DuckDuckGo does even better and just points me towards more relevant things. The index is not as large as the massive database Google has built up over the years, but I would say that DuckDuckGo does a darn good job anyway.
Being a pure search engine, there are a lot of features “missing” in comparison to the more seasoned search engines. There is no image search, which is a bit of a hassle at times, but there is one very cool features that more than makes up for it. DuckDuckGo supports a ton of “bang commands”! In case you don’t know what a bang command is, it’s more or less an exclamation mark followed by a word or symbol indicating a specific action you want the system to take. If I would like to search for videos on YouTube, I would just search for “!youtube -search term-” and have DuckDuckGo display all the relevant results. Nifty! I tried reading through their whole list of supported bang commands, but it was just too long. If you have something specific you want to search for, bang commands are your friends!
It might not always be the best for every possible search, but it does offer something that is different and works really well. As long as you learn some of the tricks, DuckDuckGo lets you search at blazing speeds, without troubling with you with a lot of tracking and hooking you into their system for monetization purposes. I highly recommend checking out the DuckDuckGo privacy policy, as it’s worth a read.
All in all I think switching my default search engine over to DuckDuckGo has been a good experiment. I tend to find what I’m after a bit more often than I did with Google, unless I need to search for something non-English. I will continue using DuckDuckGo and see where it takes me from here on, and I have a feeling it’ll be a pretty nice acquaintance in the future too.
Besides. There’s always Bing if things go really screwy. Right?
