Duck Duck Go!

I talked about DuckDuckGo.com 2 years ago on this blog. Back then it was something I stumbled upon on some now forgotten Ubuntu forum or blog.

Since then I have used it on and off.

It was a little too simple for me back then.

It has done a lot of growing up though in 2 years.

In many ways DDG is a lot like the open source community at large. It's not being developed only by those on the DuckDuckGo.com payroll, which is good because there is only one person on that payroll,  Gabriel Weinberg.

It is being developed by a large community of individuals, much like the open source projects running today.

Not only has Weinberg and his helpful voluntary staff accomplished a lot, but there is a lot still on there To Do list.

To check out the growing DDG community, go to http://duck.co/

Just like all the search engines today, DDG is continuously changing, but with the intent still on anonymity for the user, which is one of the big reasons I was drawn to it in the first place.

DDG doesn't track you. They also don't filter bubble you.

There's a video on this page that explains this better than I can:
http://duckduckgo.com/about.html

My 2 favorite reasons for using DDG as my homepage are,

1: Quick Loading. On a slow broadband connection, Google is so massively entangled in it's own "services a plenty" that it can be quite slow to load.

2: I don't get the strange, useless ads I get on Google. If you where to search for feces on Google, you will get search results like "buy feces here!" or "buy feces now!"

I am not a Google hater. Google has many services I love. Gmail, Google Calendars, this blog, Google Image search, just to name a few.

And that brings me to my next point. The DDG crew know they can't duplicate all the wonderful services Google and Bing offer. So instead of recreating the wheel, DDG lets you directly use those services though DDG, like Google Image search.

Try out DuckDuckGo.com today, I think you will be pleasantly suprised.
-Denny

P.S. Here is a list of all the DDG Goodies. It will probably do a much better job of explaining the awesome uses for DuckDuckGo then I can.

https://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html