Google is synonymous with web searching but one great alternative search engine is DuckDuckGo. When any company reaches a dominant position in the market, they may become more concerned about profits and revenue than about the security and privacy of their users.
They may also rest on their laurels and become less innovative than companies thinking up newer and better ways of doing things. The only real 'advance' we have seen from Google in recent years is the new autocomplete feature that tries to fill in your search as you type it.
Clever, yes, but many people find it confusing and slower. There is also increasing disquiet about the way that SEO companies are able to manipulate Google rankings to get their customers' websites listed higher up. It could be argued that spending big money rather than creating great content drives the rankings of websites (making searches better for large companies but worse for the user).
One great alternative search engine is DuckDuckGo. I know, you're thinking 'what a stupid name!' but consider the names of Google, Bing, Yahoo and Alta Vista – pretty stupid names too, right?
1. WOT (Web Of Trust) website safety ratings are integrated directly into the search results for safer searching. WOT maintains a database of 'safe' and 'unsafe' websites based on other users' experiences on the web and puts a simple red, yellow or green flag next to each result as an indication of whether the site is viewed as dangerous, suspicious or safe.
We think WOT is the best safe browsing tool around and Facebook obviously agree with us as they use WOT to screen website links on Facebook for possible dangerous (virus infested) sites. See our review of WOT here.
2. Useless websites that contain no real content, just adverts, are banned from the DDG results, making it easier to pick out genuinely useful results.
3. DDG does not collect or share personal information which better protects your privacy as your search history can't be tied to you.
At other search engines, when you search and click on a link, your search terms are sent to that site you clicked on. E.g. when you look for something private, you are sharing that private data not only with your search engine, but also with all the sites that you clicked on. Also, when you visit any site, your computer automatically sends information about it to that site which can be used to identify you directly. When you do that supposedly 'private' search, not only do those other sites know your search terms, but they also know that you searched it!
DDG prevents this – when you click on a link in DDG, your request is redirected in such a way that it does not send your search terms to other sites. The other sites will know that you visited them, but they will not know what data you entered beforehand.
4. DDG includes 'zero-click' (instant) answers in a red box at the top of some searches e.g. looking for 'age of Barack Obama' immediately gives his exact age in years, months and days in a red box above the list of results. You don't have to trawl through lots of websites to find the answer (like you would have to if using Google).
Zero-click answers are most likely to be available for factual requests – E.g. the age of famous people, height of a mountain, population of a country etc which you would normally have to find by visiting and trawling through the websites found in the results.
5. DDG results are listed as 'scrolling' results in a single page which can be scrolled down much quicker than having to click through multiple pages with perhaps only 10 results on each page.
In Google, to see more than the first page of results you have to click 'Next' or click the page number you want to move to. Whereas DDG shows all results in a single page that continually extends downwards as you scroll down it – no need to click anything, just keep moving down the screen and it keeps displaying more and more results.
6. DDG has lots of optional settings that you can change to suit your preferences.
7. DDG offers an integrated add-on for the Firefox browser here which makes DuckDuckGo available in the address bar, search bar and right-click menu – it also adds a handy toolbar button with more features.
You can use DDG just like any other search engine – go to the DDG search page and fire away. However, DDG has a lot more up its sleeve. If you click on 'Settings' on the DDG homepage you can see all the default settings used. It is simple to change them and we would recommend that you at least change the Region (country you live in, default is US) if required to get better results for your country.
The only problem is that any changes you make to the settings page are stored in a cookie (text file) on your computer so, if you regularly clear/delete cookies, you will lose your changes.
You can do this by adding parameters (extra text) to the end of the DDG homepage address and bookmarking (making a favorite of) the page so you never have to change the settings again. The parameters can be found here and look daunting at first but aren't once you understand how to use them – we will show you below how easy they are to configure (you only need to do this once).
Remember, you do not need to add anything unless you want to change some of the defaults.
Following these rules we would add as many settings as we wanted to change from the defaults – we'll stop our example here.
Now we have finished, we just copy the last shortcut we created http://duckduckgo.com/?q=&kl=uk-en&kf=w&k4=-1 into our address bar and hit Enter to produce a customized blank search with our amended settings.
Now we would bookmark/favorite that search page and use that bookmark/favorite for all our future searches with DDG – using the bookmark will automatically look with our customized requirements.
Thinking That Is Too Much Trouble?
Of course you can just use the standard DDG page which works very well as it is but the extra settings offer you the ability to fine tune rather than use the default options.
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