Every time a new search engine is released and makes the news there is usually a lot of initial hype, followed many months later by a “ho hum” (remember Cuil?). Duck Duck Go is a new search engine, but doesn’t fall in the trap of trying to beat or become the next Google. Duck Duck Go is actually a lot more like the original concept the founders of Google released back in 1998.
Duck Duck Go Features
Duck Duck Go is very simple, easy to use and includes many of the same features you would expect to find in a search engine. Some of the main differences included;
- AJAX like search results page with scrolling results displayed, no pagination required
- Bang! search for site and theme specific searches. A great feature for programmers and web researchers.
- Firefox search box for Duck Duck Go
- Zero-click info on searches from popular resources like Wikipedia and Crunchbase
Duck Duck Go vs. Google Results
To see how it compares to Google, I tried the same “super bowl” search in Duck Duck Go and Google. Below are some of my observations.
Observations
Google tends to serve up lots of pages from NFL.com where Duck Duck Go seems to pull different resources for each result and gives a nice result summary from Wikipedia. This could potentially drive a lot of traffic to resource sites like Wikipedia but I do like having a variety of website domains to choose from in the results. Duck Duck Go also displays a small favicon next to each result and the result changes color as you hover down the results page.
Other Google Alternative Search Engines
- Blekko – Blekko has some interesting search features such as “slashtags” where you can search by a specific site or type. It also displays 20 rather than 10 results for each page. Blekko also has a human editors to help clean up the search results. The name kinda of sounds like you have a bad cold. Read more about blekko.
- Powerset – Now part of Bing search.