You Should Use DuckDuckGo 

You should be using this
You should be using this

Casey Liss of ATP fame:

Yes, sometimes that has problems.

No, the search results aren’t always as good.

Yes, I sometimes fall back to Google.

Yes, I still think it’s worth it.

I too have been using DuckDuckGo to power my searches for the past few months. It might even be up to a year at this point, but I just can’t remember that far back. And despite its occasional shortcomings when it comes to images, Google is still a little bit better at finding random images, such as product box images that I use in eBay listings. It is absolutely the best search engine out there.

Free t-shirt!
Free t-shirt!

And as was the case for Casey, once Apple added DuckDuckGo to iOS 8 as an option for the default search engine in MobileSafari.app, I stopped using DuckDuckGo’s older, wonkier solution.

They do have an iOS app, which is decent, but I hate that it doesn’t launch with a ‘fresh,’ Drafts-style blank slate.

And finally, Casey points out some great !bang operator’s that you can add to your search queries.

I use !so[1], !ebay,[2] and !a.[3]

Don’t take Casey’s or my advice. Try it for yourself. You won’t be disappointed (only Google will be disappointed).


  1. Stack Overflow

  2. eBay searches are nice with DuckDuckGo, because you can modify the bang operator with normal eBay query stuffs. For instance, if I wanted to search for Marco’s latest and greatest headphone recommendation, the BeoPlay H6’s, but want to omit erroneous results featuring the not-wanted H8’s, I can search with the query !ebay beoplay h6 -h8. So great.

  3. Amazon: the Wal-Mart of our time