You might have heard about DuckDuckGo search engine. If not, it’s the search engine that doesn’t track you at all. But, this is not the only great cool thing about it. There are several other cool features, called “goodies” by DuckDuckGo, that will make you think about changing your default search engine.
In this article, I’ll be telling you about some geeky DuckDuckGo tricks that make it better than Google and much more work-friendly:
Quick Navigation
If you are more of a keyboard guy, DuckDuckGo is the place for you. You can easily navigate through the search results with the help of some keys. Here are some shortcuts:
- <j>: To move down through the results
- <k>: To move up through the results
- <l> or <Enter>: To open the highlighted link
- <h> or </>: To go to search bar
- <s>: To go to misspelled link
- <t>: To go to the top of the page
Cheat sheets
This is an awesome feature of DuckDuckGo. If you’ve had a hard time remembering keyboard shortcuts, for example, the list I’ve given above, and you’ve to go through the entire manual or a blog post just for a quick reference, DuckDuckGo has got you all covered.
They’ve got most of the applications, like Vim, covered for which there are a number of key bindings. Just type the application name followed by “cheat sheet.” For example, look at the Firefox cheat sheet below.
Similarly, you can look for the DuckDuckGo cheat sheet at DuckDuckGo.
Instant Answers
DuckDuckGo provides instant answers to several queries. Here are some results.
Movies with
Type “movies with” followed by your favorite actor’s/actress’ name and you’ll get what you wanted. Let’s search for “movies with Jesse Eisenberg.”
Soundcloud
Listen to music directly through DuckDuckGo. In the search bar, type artist’s name followed by “Soundcloud.” For an instant, “Daft Punk Soundcloud”:
Recipes
Search for recipes directly from DuckDuckGo. Looking for pizza recipe? Type “pizza recipe”.
Weather
Check out the weather. Just type “weather” or “weather <location name>”.
And much much more…
There are hundreds of more cool instant answers. Try these queries at DuckDuckGo: “stopwatch,” “password strong,” “lose yourself lyrics,” “rhymes with cool” etc. It’s a pretty cool feature for a search engine.
Bang Search
It is my favorite. For instance type “!a blazers” in the DuckDuckGo search bar. What bang search does is, it directly redirects you to the site you wanted to search for. For this example, “!a” refers to amazon. So, you’ll see the available blazers directly at amazon. No more clicking links in the search results. There are thousands of bang searches available (currently 6396) and increasing. You can search for a movie, say “Ant-Man,” directly at “IMDB,” through DuckDuckGo by searching “!IMDB Ant-Man”.
Customize
People can easily customize DuckDuckGo according to them. Click on the menu at the top right corner of the page for customization options. As DuckDuckGo does not store your information, it depends on the browser cookies for remembering settings. So whenever you’ll reset your browser, your settings will be gone. To prevent this, they provide an option to store your settings in the cloud. That’s a pretty good feature too.
Did you find these DuckDuckGo search tricks helpful? Tell us in the comments below.