I love using DuckDuckGo for my search engine. Not only do they refuse to track you and what you search for, giving you the same results your friend gets and without showing you ads for things you search for a few days later , they also make searching specific websites a lot easier with !bang commands. And with their recent redesign they’re even more helpful than ever.
Actually calling what happened at DuckDuckGo recently a “redesign” is only telling part of the story. As they put it on their blog post announcing the changes they “reimagined and redesigned” the site and how it works. One of the things I love is that you can now get instant answers at the top of your search results, making the results even easier to use. You can not only get information from Wikipedia and other sites (under the heading “About”), you also get images and video relating to your search request. Their answer bar now give you definitions, audio files and even products related to your search request.
They love giving this link as a favorite example of the kind of information they give you, but today I found something that shows off their redesign pretty well as well. Today while checking to see what new ebooks have been published with Smashwords (the distributor of my ebooks) I discovered a book called Adventures with a Moke. The word “moke” isn’t a word I hear all the time and I wanted to check what people normally mean when they use that word. I selected the word, right clicked it and clicked on “Search DuckDuckGo for ‘Moke’” in my content (right-click) menu. This is the top of the screen I got.
That pretty much gave me what I expected, and when I clicked on Definition the answer bar changed to show this
Pretty cool, eh? I bet Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the other guys wish they could do what the Duck does now. No matter what you search for online consider trying the Duck for your online searches for a week. I bet you’ll like the results so much you may make it one of your primary search engines, if not your default search engine.