DuckDuckGo

Some of my more astute readers might have noticed the "word" "DuckDuckGo" appearing several times on my blog this year, both as a noun and as a verb. Contrary to how the name sounds, it's not a board game; it's a search engine. It's an alternative to Google.

DuckDuckGo promises to be more privacy friendly. They say they don't track you and they don't show targeted ads, only keyword related ads.

Below are the results if you search for me on DuckDuckGo and on Google:

Google has a bit fancier organization of my blog content. But actually DuckDuckGo has only my accounts on the first page, while Google quickly veers off to showing links of other people, such as a LoL gamer.

One of the really cool features of DDG are the bangs. If you enter !g in your search query, DuckDuckGo will redirect you to search on Google (supposedly with some fewer cookies). yt will search on YouTube, gm on Google Maps and so on. They have several thousand bangs already. This is actually a time saving feature, because you can search directly from the address bar, without having to go to that other site first. And when DDG search results are not good enough, you can just add a bang and search on Google.

Another cool feature for programmers: DDG has much better StackOverflow integration. When you search for something programming related, they often show a snippet on the side with the top answer from StackOverflow. It makes copy pasting sooo much easier.

If you think it's funny that an ex-Googler uses DuckDuckGo, you should have seen the faces of my colleagues at Google when they saw that I was using DDG at Google. And even funnier was when my manager noticed this and then we had a discussion about why he doesn't use it: local queries (searching for nearby restaurants for example) were not working very well in DuckDuckGo and he used them very often. Well Suman, if you are reading this, DuckDuckGo now has you covered on that front too.  

If you are interested in alternatives to the big tech companies, I highly recommend using DuckDuckGo.

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload - Day 16.