Phil Bradley's weblog

Some DuckDuckGo tricks Google doesn't have

If you're looking for reasons to try out DuckDuckGo and haven't quite got around to it, perhaps this blog post might give you the push you need. Here are a few things that you can do on DDG that you can't do on Google - or if you can, it's more difficult. 

Using the ! search option

I can search different resources while I'm on DDG, which obviously I can' t do in Google, Simply using the ! or 'bang' command, I can tell DDG to run a search on a different search engine or site. So for example a search for !googleuk search_term will search on the Google UK site for me. Why would I want to do that? Simply because Google then doesn't know who I am, so I don't get results that are tainted by personalisation. Alternatively, if I wanted to search say, Wikipedia, rather than fuss around with site: the way that I have to with Google, I can simply do !w search_term and get to exactly what I need. 

Simple cheatsheets

This doesn't work with every single tool that's out there, but a search for Cheatsheet Google gives me an entire list of the basic commands that I can do on that search engine. Looks a bit like this:

Up or down?

There are plenty of  sites that will tell you if a site is up or down, but if I'm already using DDG, why bother to go elsewhere? Simply ask 'is <site> down and you'll quickly find out.

Color codes

You probably won't need this one very often, but it's useful to have, and besides, it does bright up a blog posting! If you want to see what the value of colours are, simply type in color codes and feast your eyes.

Change text

This is an oddity, and I have no idea why you can do it, but you can. If you have a bunch of text and you want to go from upper to lower case, type or paste it into the search box, with lowercase in front of it. You'll then a box with your text all in lower case. 

(No, it doesn't work the other way around though - how mad is that?)

Create a QR code

I know everyone seems to hate QR codes, but they do have a value now and then. Simply type qr before a URL and get a QR code for that site.

Expand a shortened URL

Short URLs from sites like bit.ly can be really useful, but the problem is that you don't know where they are taking you until you're there. DDG allows you to expand the URL to see exactly what it is without taking you anywhere at all. 

Create strong passwords

Simply tell DDG how long you want the password to be, and it will create it for you. 

(Yes you can get it to create weak passwords by simply using password 8 weak, but not sure why you'd want to!)

 

So there you go - a few fun and useful things that you can do on DuckDuckGo that you can't do on Google. 

 

 

Search engines and the dinosaurs

Trust search engines to give you good information? Probably not wise. There's a story doing the rounds now that if you do a search on Google for the words what happened to the dinosaurs you get a very biased and religious reply. Take a look at it:

The book linked from the right hand side of the page is also a Christian based commentary. It's worth noting that I did this search at about 15.15 today, and the result is still there, despite assurances from Google that they have dropped it. Google crowdsources a lot of stuff, and you can see that the Answersingenesis website is also the third answer down. The same result comes up if you search for what happened to dinosaurs. 

Now, you might be thinking, ok, let's try another search engine instead! You get very little luck elsewhere.

Duckduckgo: Answeringenesis website is the first result.

Bing: Answeringenesis website is the first result.

Yahoo: Answeringenesis website is the first result. However, they do have some news items that question these results above it.

Gigablast: A YouTube video pops up first, and the Answeringenesis website is the third result.

Yandex: Answeringenesis website is the first result.

Ixquick: Answeringenesis website is the first result.

I could go on I'm sure, but I think you get the picture. DO NOT TRUST SEARCH ENGINES! (Ask a librarian instead!)

Blekko joins the list of the lost

Blekko, which came onto the search scene in 2008 as a startup search engine to rival Google has closed its doors. The site displays a message that says they have joined IBM and the page then redirects to an IBM blog. Blekko was attempting to offer a different approach to search with their 'slash tags' and phrase 'slash the web', by which people could search and add in a filter or operator such as /images and users could also create their own.

This then morphed into a slightly different approach which was supposed to be more user friendly for tablets and they also produced a new engine, izik which was specifically for tablet devices - this page is also attempting a redirect but sadly is failing to do so. I'll leave you to speculate on the abilities of the programming team!

It's not exactly a surprise really - the engine has been very quiet for a couple of years and there were no real announcements on their blog for a similar period of time. I'd pretty much stopped referencing them, and I think most other search commentators had also given up on them too. It's a shame, but it does illustrate just how difficult it is to break into the search engine field with a product that's designed to rival Google and Bing. The last real alternative available now is DuckDuckGo, which is an excellent option and one worth exploring if you haven't done so already.

DuckDuckGo makes improvements

DuckDuckGo is one of the search engines that can reasonably seen to be a competitor to Google, at least in the area of privacy, because it doesn't store or track the searches that you do. Not only is this a Good Thing, but it also means that DDG can't personalise your results, cutting out potentially useful material in the way that Google can.

DDG has just improved its interface, making it much smoother, and even easier to use. Let's look at the old version for a search:

Useful of course, but it's not going to set the world alight. It's also not easy to see how you can search for images or video for example. However, the new version which you'll find at https://next.duckduckgo.com/ is rather different.

The disambiguation is far clearer, and the white space makes it much easier to read each result. You can click on the images/videos option and see those displayed equally neatly, and can change the display method into a tiled approach if you want. I really like the new approach - much fresher and more helpful. It's still in a beta mode at the moment, but it will be moving across to become the default in short order, I'm sure.

Some fun DuckDuckGo search operators

Every search engine does fun and interesting things (try searching for do a barrel roll in Google), and DuckDuckGo has a few fun ones as well. Here's a list of some of the ones that I found particularly interesting.

days between 01/01/2000 /03/31/2014 tells you how many days there have been between the two dates (but remember to do it MM/DD/YYYY, rather than the proper, ie. British way!)

argos coupon tries to find any coupons that are available to save you money on stuff.

google+ philbradley will find you people with the searched name who are on the Google social network.

@philbradley will find you information on a Twitter account, as well as their last tweet.

password x strong will create a password for you that's a mixture of characters and symbols which is going to be difficult to break. Just replace the x with the number of characters that you want, obviously.

qr code bbc.co.uk creates a QR code for the requested website.

expand http://bit.ly/a will expand out the URL so you can check where you're going before you get there. (That one takes you to Apple.com in case you were interested)

is bbc.com up? will check the required site to see if it is currently available.

There are plenty of others, and I found these via a handy cheatsheet over at Techglimpse in case you're interested in looking at shortcuts that specifically relate to geeks, techies and system admin folks. For the rest of us though, this is probably all that you'll need!