Juicing Your Search-fu With DuckDuckGo
I read a great post by Danny Schriber over at the Zapier blog on setting up Google Chrome for Marketers. Don’t miss how he uses Chrome Profiles, it blew my mind.
I do have one slight improvement to one of his suggestions, and that’s using DuckDuckGo to power custom search.
If you aren’t familiar with DuckDuckGo, they are a search engine. Their claim to fame is they don’t collect or retain any personal search data. They’ve capitalized on this policy when Google and other search providers have made the news regarding changes to their privacy policy, or anonymized search data has been used to connect searches with people who performed them. Be sure to check out their privacy policy, it’s great.
Getting Started With DuckDuckGo####
The first thing you’ll need to do is set DuckDuckGo as your default search provider in Chrome. DDG has made this pretty easy. Head over to https://duckduckgo.com/ and click on “Use in Chrome” at the bottom of that page.
Don’t forgot to go to chrome://settings and make DuckDuckGo your default search engine.
DuckDuckGo uses !bangs, so you can modify your searches and send them to a different search engine. If you don’t find DDG results helpful, try your search again and add “!g” to the end. This bang will send your search to the Google result page for the term you entered. If you’re looking to buy a book, enter the title in the Omnibox and add !a to send your search to Amazon.
My Favorite !Bangs
Here’s a list of DuckDuckGo curated !bangs, but here are a few I think you’ll use most often:
- !g => search google.com
- !i => search google.com/images
- !a => search amazon.com
- !yt => search youtube.com
- !down => search downforeveryoneorjustme.com
- !whois => search whois.domaintools.com
- !so => search stackoverflow.com
- !tw => search twitter.com
- !fb => search facebook.com
- !li => search linkedin.com
- !gmail => search gmail.com
- !giphy => search giphy.com
- !flickrc => search flickr.com for CC licensed images
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for a couple of years now and it fits perfectly in my workflow because of !bangs. Be sure to check out the entire list of supported bangs, and let me know if there are any essentials I left off my list.