How To Improve Your DuckDuckGo Search Experience
For the past weeks or so, I have been using the DuckDuckGo search engine for my Internet research. You can read about the motivation for the move here. In that time, I have learned a few tricks that improved my search experience and I would like to share those today with all of you.
One of the major issues with every search engine is that you sometimes cannot seem to find what you are looking for. That's true for Bing, Google Search and also DuckDuckGo. When that happened, I initially loaded the web address of Google Search or Bing Search manually, pasted in the copied search phrase to search on the new search engine again in hope of finding an answer there.
Soon thereafter I discovered a more comfortable way of redirecting searches to another search engine.
All I had to do was to add !g for Google, !b for Bing or any of the hundreds of additional "bangs" to the search phrase to open the search results on the selected search engine.
Those shortcuts are not only available for general search engines, but also for other sites that you may want to find information on. Here is a short selection of shortcuts that I found most useful:
- !ms (Microsoft.com)
- !apple (Apple.com)
- !chrome (Google Web Store)
- !firefox (Mozilla Addons Repository)
- !opera (Opera.com)
- !wp (WordPress)
- !technet (search social.technet.microsoft.com)
- !amazon (Amazon.com)
- !ebay (Ebay.com)
- !craigslist (Craigslist)
- !w (Wikipedia)
You can find all of the shortcuts on this page. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of them so be prepared to spend some time on the page (yes, there is even the !ghacks bang to search exclusively on this site).
Bangs may redirect queries to non-search related services. Use !deepl to redirect the query to the translator DeepL, !alt to search for software alternatives on Alternative.to, or !archive to search the Internet archive.
Keyboard shortcuts
The second tip that I have for you is about keyboard shortcuts you can use on the search engine's site to speed up navigating on the website.
You can for instance use the down cursor key to select one of the search results, and press enter to load it directly all without using the mouse. And if you hold down Ctrl while doing that or press "v", you can open the result in a new tab instead.
If you hit the "d" key, you perform a new search exclusively on the highlighted domain.
Have other tips to share? Lets hear about them in the comments.
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.