DuckDuckGo: Finding things without Google
The enshittification of Google continues with its pivot from search results to AI-generated answers. DuckDuckGo originated in 2008 as a niche Google clone with a few additional tools, but its killer feature is now that it still has search results.
Aside from search results, there are a few additional features, mostly available directly from the search bar. This article highlights some of the more useful features.
Search other sites
Bangs are keywords preceded with a ! symbol
which direct the search terms to another website, allowing you to search one of
several thousand sites directly.
For example, searching DuckDuckGo for !w star trek will search Wikipedia for
“star trek”, in practice taking you directly to the Wikipedia page. !wt will
take you to Wiktionary, !wq to Wikiquote, and so on. !startrek will direct
your search to Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki.
Some other useful bangs include !omap for Open Street Maps, !wbm to search
the Wayback Machine for a given URL, !py for the Python documentation, and
!php for the PHP documentation.
You can use bangs to modify the DuckDuckGo search settings for one search, such
as !safe and !safeoff to enable or disable Safe Search, or !i to use image
search. You can also search other search engines, such as !g for Google.
Unit conversion
Conversion between units can be done directly. For example, searching DuckDuckGo
for 6 feet in cm gives unit conversion, and currency conversion can be done as
easily, e.g. 100 JPY in USD.
For more advanced conversions, use the !wa bang to directly search Wolfram
Alpha. You can do something like !wa the circumference of the earth divided by
the speed of light. See the
Wolfram Alpha tour
for examples of the calculations that site is capable of, including astronomy,
advanced mathematics, weather, and nutrition. For the calculations it has been
programmed with, Wolfram Alpha is more reliable than AI.
Random number generation
You can roll dice using the keyword “roll” with D&D-style dice notation, such as
roll 1d4, roll 10d6, or roll 1d20+4. You will receive the results and a
total. It appears to support up to ten dice.
You can also type something like random number between 1 and 20.
It can also be used for password generation, using such phrases as password,
password 32 characters, or passphrase 10 words. If you’re paranoid about
getting your passwords from a search engine, however, you might deploy a
local script.
AI (or no AI)
Even DuckDuckGo has gotten in on the AI chatbot trend. https://duck.ai offers free anonymous usage of various AI models, including an image generation feature (with built-in safety filter, naturally).
If you want to ensure no AI at all, searching via https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ will do that. It attempts to detect and disable AI-generated images in Image results, disables the Search Assist feature, and hides links to duck.ai. You can also simply disable all three in settings.