I’m rarely satisfied with the tools that I’m using. I’m always on the hunt for better products, services, and apps; looking for the perfect solution for me. This nag to try out different products made me try out Windows Phone for a year because of my frustration with Android, and a shift to Bing for a couple of months. It wasn’t a bad experience, but it wasn’t great either. A few tasks got a lot easier, but a lot of things I wanted to do got harder or impossible. It’s about priorities and tradeoffs, and Windows Phone didn’t fit mine.

I came to know about DuckDuckGo around 2010, but I never gave it a serious try, because, well, Google was good enough. And more importantly, the effort of setting DuckDuckGo as the default search engine before OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 were released was higher than the expected gain. I didn’t want to go through the hacks and extensions to set it as my default search engine, even if it was possible.

What Led To It?

Searching for § on Google.

I was reading an article on Wikipedia and came across the § symbol. I was pretty sure, given my previous experience, that Google won’t be any help if I just search for §. And sure enough, that was the case.

I had mixed experience with Bing while searching for symbols, and was fairly confident it would give me the right answer, and Bing didn’t disappoint. Nevertheless, I decided to give DuckDuckGo a shot. It did tell me what the symbol was, as an Instant Answer, with a bunch of stuff in what I believe is Russian.

The section sign! And lots of Russian.

DuckDuckGo is the new default

Bing does provide the best results when I search for §, but I was still impressed with DuckDuckGo, and really liked the UI of the page that I decided to give it a go, and make it my default search engine to test it for about a month, skeptically, presuming I’ll be switching back to Google within a week; but I was wrong.

What The Duck!

Using DuckDuckGo for a few hours made me realise it’s power. The song Touch by Shura was stuck in my head for a while. I thought I’ll liberate it by giving it a listen, and typed in shura touch into the search field expecting to find the YouTube link at the top, and the SoundCloud link (which I actually wanted to go to) much further down. That was true, but DDG did something much more magical.

Don’t judge me for liking this song.

DuckDuckGo, from here on abbreviated to DDG, searched SoundCloud for it, displayed the results in a row at the top, with the first entry being the song I wanted to listen to. Not only that, I could play it right there without the need to open SoundCloud. I was delighted with this result that I decided to explore what all integrations DDG offers which I could find handy. So, in a typical listicle style, here goes.

Some Odd Number Of Things You Didn’t Know DuckDuckGo Could Do

Because you probably never used DuckDuckGo

!Bang Searches

!Bang !Bang !Bang

This is probably the most useful and important aspect of DDG. As explained on the DDG !bang page:

!bangs are shortcuts that start with an exclamation point like, !wikipedia and !espn. Use them to quickly search other sites from the DuckDuckGo search box.

Want to go to the Wikipedia entry for Ada Lovelace, just search for !w Ada Lovelace, and you’ll be at her Wikipedia page. You can search right on Google with !g, on YouTube with !yt and Google Maps with !maps, making DDG act as an aggregator of search engines. My personal favourite is using Wolfram Alpha right in my address bar with !wa. There are hundreds of supported !bang commands, and by most chances, you’ll find quite a few of them useful. And if you ever forget or want to check out if a !bang command exists for the website you want, you can just type in !bang and find the complete list.