Today I read about a new search engine on Lifehacker [ link ], and I have switched since then. Partly because of the fact that Google is indeed watching you, but mostly because it has some nifty features that Google hasn’t or hasn’t implemented as well.
The name is DuckDuckGo. Like any modern online entity, you can find them at multiple spots: on their site, on Twitter, on the founder’s blog, on Facebook.
Things I like most:
- Absence of clutter, much like how Google first started out. There is literally no advertising to be found.
- Less spam results. Searching for very general keywords typically results in pages that exist solely to redirect you to other link sites. Not the case here !
- Disambiguation, like we know it from searching Wikipedia for example, but this time ’round with search keywords. So it goes further than the obligatory and simple “Did you mean?”-functionality.
- Zero-click info: automatic recognition of keyword subject. Other search engines do this as well in some form, but DuckDuckGo takes it up a notch.
- !bang-searching: handy stuff. Read more.
- Keyboard ninja features: navigate the results etc. by keyboard.
Things I would like:
Better recognition of (international) addresses: searching for my home address in Google works as expected (showing a map result), this does not (yet?) work in Duck Duck Go for my Belgian style address.
Take a look for yourself or compare with the common search engines.
Read my other posts about my online services switch away from Google:
Moving webmail from Gmail to Outlook.com
Moving address book from Google Contacts to Microsoft People
Switching personal cloud service from Google Drive to SkyDrive
Moving file hosting service from Dropbox to SkyDrive
How Google is slowly losing me as a client to Microsoft
Switching search engines from Google to DuckDuckGo
Room of a pleinolijf 