Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's take a look at using DuckDuckGo as your default search engine.
Now if you've looked in your Safari Preferences and you go to the Search tab here you can
see that you can select a search engine.
There are four choices now.
Goggle, Yahoo, and Bing you are probably all familiar with.
The fourth one you may not have heard of.
It's called DuckDuckGo.
Let's switch to that and take a look.
You can search using any search engine that you want at any time by simply going to that
search engine's homepage.
So I can, for instance, if I want to use Bing to search I can go to Bing.com and use the
search box here.
However that default search engine allows you to type in a search term here at the top
and it will search rather than having to go to the search engine first.
So I can type in the term MacBook Pro.
Now it is going to use the default search engine, in this case DuckDuckGo, and it is
going to give me search results here.
I can see a variety of things like a Wikipedia page at the top, some related topics, it even
marks the official site for this search term here, an Apple site.
I can scroll down and see search results.
It looks fairly standard.
It doesn't look too different from Goggle or Bing or other search engines.
So why use DuckDuckGo over Goggle?
Well it is a matter of personal preference for most people.
DuckDuckGo, when you go to their page, talks about not tracking you.
That is their main selling point that they try to push.
Not tracking you.
But there is some interesting features.
It is pretty fast.
It displays things a little differently.
A little cleaner a lot of times than other search engines.
It is definitely worth giving a try.
It's easy, as you can see, to switch back and forth, by just going to Safari Preferences.
So trying DuckDuckGo for a day or an hour is pretty easy.
In looking for things that I like about it, I like that they have these things called
Bangs.
Bangs are terms that start with an exclamation point, like that.
Then you type a term, like say Apple, and then search for something.
What will happen is that Bang there will tell it instead of giving me general search results
to search a specific website.
In this case Apple.
So Bangs basically allows you to skip a main page.
For instance, if I wanted to search for something on Amazon I can do !amazon and then search
for something.
Now it skips me having to go to amazon.com first and type in something in the search
box over here.
There is a huge list of Bangs if you go to DuckDuckGo.com/Bang and you can see tons of
different things here for different subjects in different categories.
This page goes on forever so you can really see a lot of interesting things that you can
search for very quickly skipping a page.
There is a lot here that has a lot to do with coding and technology.
So, for instance, if I wanted to search for a command in Javascript I can simply do !js
space and then the name of the term and it takes me to the official mozilla developer
pages for it.
There is also a Settings page for DuckDuckGo that you can use to set a ton of different
things about how searches are performed.
You can even select themes for the search results and do things like use different fonts
and things like that.
You can select privacy settings.
You can also use DuckDuckGo on your iPad or iPhone.
Just go into the Settings app there and then go down to Safari Settings.
You can see the first one there is for choosing a default search engine.
But just like with on the Mac or anywhere you can always go to the website for searching.
I'd love to hear from you if you have been using DuckDuckGo.
I loved to hear what you like or don't like about it.
Leave a comment to this video at MacMost.com.