If you are new to DuckDuckGo, it is an internet search engine emphasizes protecting searchers’ privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. Over the years, DuckDuckGo-the anonymous search engine made a magnificent growth. The search engine offered 16 billion anonymous searches. There daily direct traffic average is now 36 million. The year 2018 is their breakout year, the average daily private searches leap 63%, from 19 million to 31 million. Duckduckgo becomes the default search engine in private browsing mode in Firefox, Vivaldi and in Brave browser. In their about page they wrote “You deserve privacy. Companies are making money off of your private information online without your consent.”
Yes, that is actually true. You won’t get any free food, you have to do some work, or have to earn something to get your daily food. But in online almost everything offered for free! You will get a powerful search engine, an awesome social network, super instant messaging apps, tons of free storage spaces to store your images and free browsers to surf through the internet. If you go through these websites you may notice that everything required a lot of investment, powerful hardware, terabytes of storage spaces, and 24×7 working of expert teams. All for free? No, not possible. Then where did they get the money to fund their sharp brains and for infrastructure? Definitely through advertisement. The more the advertisement the more money will get. The more people visit the more the advertisement displayed. The more the competition among advertisers, naturally shell of more money for better rankings. So simply converting traffic to money.
Google search, founded in 1998 has now 40 billion pages indexed and getting 9 billion daily direct search queries. DuckDuckGo does not use Google search servers or algorithms to show its search results. But they anonymously search YouTube on your behalf to display video results.
DuckDuckGo Search engine offers privacy. If you are searching on other search engines, they have monitored your query keywords to display relevant advertisements. DuckDuckGo claims they respect your privacy and does not track your searches. You can select your search by region, by selection region in the settings page. You can access settings by clicking the three lines at the top right corner, and in the menu box ‘other settings‘.
Privacy is a big concern in the case of DuckDuckGo. If you don’t want to see an advertisement you can turn off advertisements on the settings page. Some cool features of DuckDuckGo are,
Cloud Save
Cloud Save, saves your settings permanently in the cloud by entering a passphrase. So you can share your settings among computers and browsers.
Keyboard Shortcuts
DuckDuckGo supports keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the results. Top open the results- Enter key or O to go to the highlighted result, or can use it to go to the first result. You can see the DuckDuckGo keyboard shortcuts here.
Social Media Information
DuckDuckGo offers social media profile information in its search results. Search for @coolefriend in DuckDuckGo will display the Twitter information about the page. The Twitter handle, the number of followers and slogan will be displayed.
Shorten and expand URLs
You can easily find the shortened URL, before opening it to the browser. To see the shortened URL, in DuckDuckGo search box, enter ‘expand https://is.gd/i97W9c‘, the expanded URL will be displayed. To shorten a big URL, enter ‘shorten https://coolefriend.com/why-you-should-use-duckduckgo-search-engine/‘, you will get a shortened URL sing is.gd service.
What are DuckDuckGo bangs?
Bangs are shortcuts that quickly take you to search results on other sites. For example, when you know you want to search on another site like Wikipedia or Amazon, our bangs get you there fastest. For example, a search for !w filter bubble will take you directly to Wikipedia. !a – amazon, 1w – for Wikipedia, !twitter- for Twitter, !reddit – for Reddit, !maps for Maps, etc. are some bangs. You can search for more bangs here.
Generate Random password
To generate a random password, search ‘Password 20‘ in DuckDuckGo. You will see a Random password of 20 characters long with its strength.
Instant Stopwatch
Just search ‘stopwatch‘ in DuckDuckGo, you will get a nice stopwatch ready to start.
Check Websites downtime
If you can’t open a website or thinking that that website is not accessible just for you. How to check whether the site is up or down? In DuckDuckGo search ‘Is wikipedia.com down‘, will display “wikipedia.com seems up“, if the website is ok.
View the calendar
Just search for ‘calendar April 2019‘ will display the April 2019 calendar with today’s date.
Recipes
To view recipe search results, click the link Recipes under the search box. Clicking on a recipe search result will bring up more information about the recipe, including a detailed taste profile. Just search for fish recipes.
Image Search
To view the image search results, click the link Images under the search box. To expand the image search results, click the grid icon at the top right of the image search results. To collapse the results, click the X icon at the top right of the results.
Search Places
To view the place search results, click the link Places under the search box. To find places near a location, search for the place type and the location.
Search Videos
To see the video search results, click the link Videos under the search box. To expand the video search results, click the grid icon at the top right of the video search results. To then collapse the results, click the X icon at the top right of the results.
Search by Date
In DuckDuckGo, you have the ability to limit search results to a certain timeframe. You can filter the results from the past day, week, or month, you can select it from the date filter dropdown to the right of the search box on the desktop. On your mobile, it’s available on the menu by tapping the ‘three-line‘ icon at the top right.
Alternative To
You can search for alternatives by using ‘alternative to’ in the DuckDuckGo search box. For example ‘alternative to Wikipedia‘ shows Wikipedia alternatives.
Revenue generation model for DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo making revenue from non-tracking affiliate partnerships with Amazon and eBay. They sell advertising directly based on search interests, avoiding going through the hyper-targeted advertising systems of Google and Facebook, explains Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO, and Founder of DuckDuckGo.com.
Just search for ‘figlet coolefriend.com‘ in DuckDuckGo and feel the result.
