This article was written on March 29, 2011 by CyberNet.
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed when using Google is the additional information they will provide you with at the top of your search results. The list includes things like weather info, calculation results, sports scores, and more. All of this means you don’t have to turn to another site just to find the answers to these quick questions.
The DuckDuckGo search engine is another great resource that puts data from dozens of third-party sources at the top of your results. When it is relavent DuckDuckGo will show information from sites such as Wikipedia, Merriam-Webster dictionary, WolframAlpha, and dozens of others. All of this should mean that you won’t have to sift through results to find the answer to some of your basic questions. Too lazy to look out the window? Just ask it if it is raining and it will use its location-aware skills to see if it is raining in your location.
Aside from that this is a search engine, and that is where this may be hit or miss for some of you. Instead of being powered by Google this uses Bing for the search results. Some of you may prefer that, while I’m sure others won’t even consider using it for this very reason.
If you do decide to give DuckDuckGo a try you’ll want to sift through the settings because there are a lot of things you can customize. You can change the appearance/colors, remove ads, take a look at keyboard shortcuts, configure auto paging so that you can continuously scroll through results, and much more. You’ll also want to check out these resources to see what kind of calculations and special searches are possible:
- General Searches: basic calculations, dates, facts, geography, IDs, properties, random numbers, time, and more.
- Math/Programming Searches: advanced calculations, conversions, computing, formulas, physical properties, transformations, and more.
The one thing I really love is the way this brings in WolframAlpha data… because there is so much info available on that site but I frequently forget to use it for my searches. Since I’ve started using DuckDuckGo I’ve noticed that there are even more answers available on WolframAlpha that I didn’t even realize they had.
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