Trying Duck Duck Go

↤ February 11^th, 2012

A recent Talk Show mentions Duck Duck Go as a privacy-conscious alternative to Google as a search engine. I thought I’d give it a shot.

I’m using Safari as my main browser and its list of configurable search engines is hardcoded. I can’t even get to it using some default write trickery. John Gruber details a neat hack to get Duck Duck Go as your default serach engine in Safari regardless.

1. Add the Duck Duck Go IP address 46.51.197.88 (or .89) to your /etc/hosts file with the hostname search.yahoo.com.
2. Change your default engine in Safari to Yahoo.
3. There is no step three.

So far…

…the experience is nice. Duck Duck Go is notacibly slower than Google’s serach, but it isn’t bad and the results are good. One neat feature is that if Duck Duck Go detects that it can offer you quick links to, say Wikipedia, those will show up almost instantly and it turns out that is most of what I want.

UPDATE October 15th, 2012: The speed difference has gone down a lot.

I’m occasionally interested in looking at the image serach results for a web search and with Google that’s just one click away and I do miss that now, but I figure a dotjs script or Safari extension will get me that feature back quickly.

UPDATE October 15th, 2012: There are a number of !-commands that help here.

Aside, I’m trying to live with as little as possible customisations, but in recent months, Is tarted adding little tweaks here and there. We’ll see when I go closer to “bare” again.

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