On: The 50 Best Websites of 2011

[doctoboggan]

I've heard a lot of about duckduckgo on here and on reddit. Are there actual compelling reasons to use this service over google? Is the only reason their privacy policy?

I saw a commenter on the linked site state that duckduckgo is great for programming, what does this mean?

[aperiodic → doctoboggan]

These are the things I use daily that I find the most useful:

Lots of nice zero-click goodies: * StackOverflow integration: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=remove+directory+symlink (can also search directly with !so) * IP Address: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=ip * Common symbol tables: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table http://duckduckgo.com/?q=html+entities * Wolfram Alpha integration: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=d%28cos%28x^2%29%2F%28e^x%29%29+dx

Disambiguation (great for software with a common word/term as a name), e.g. homebrew: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=homebrew

Favicons in the results. This lets me easily focus in on the sites that I think will be most useful.

Direct search of many programming references with bang-syntax: * Ruby: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!ruby+IO * JQuery: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!jquery+fadeIn * Clojure: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!clojure+deref

There are many more goodies I keep discovering (one nice surprise the other day was that searching for "Community" (a TV show) gave me the air date of the next episode). The best feature of DDG is the extensive integration with domain-specific information sources or search tools that often give me the information I'm looking for with no clicks at all.

[mayanksinghal → aperiodic]

[Requests formatting]

[aperiodic → mayanksinghal]

Yikes, sorry about that.

These are the things I use daily that I find the most useful:

Lots of nice zero-click goodies:

* StackOverflow integration: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=remove+directory+symlink (can also search directly with !so)

* IP Address: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=ip

* Common symbol tables: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table http://duckduckgo.com/?q=html+entities

* Wolfram Alpha integration: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=d%28cos%28x^2%29%2F%28e^x%29%29+dx

Disambiguation (great for software with a common word/term as a name), e.g. homebrew: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=homebrew

Favicons in the results. This lets me easily focus in on the sites that I think will be most useful.

Direct search of many programming references with bang-syntax:

* Ruby: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!ruby+IO

* JQuery: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!jquery+fadeIn

* Clojure: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!clojure+deref

There are many more goodies I keep discovering (one nice surprise the other day was that searching for "Community" (a TV show) gave me the air date of the next episode). The best feature of DDG is the extensive integration with domain-specific information sources or search tools that often give me the information I'm looking for with no clicks at all.

[mayanksinghal → aperiodic]

Thanks :)

(And yeah, I understand that I could have done that myself and hence the downvote)

[dangrossman → doctoboggan]

Do some programming related searches on DDG and you'll see the difference. Google gives me a list of links, DDG gave me a function definition and description from a language manual... on the result page.

[thecombjelly → doctoboggan]

The best reason for me is the quality. Between the disambiguation feature and the lack of spam and crappy sites, DDG is really good at finding what you want it to.

[omaranto → thecombjelly]

In some domains. Whenever I give it a go, as soon as I turn to work it fails me (work is math for me).

[epi0Bauqu → omaranto]

Would love to incorporate a lot more math stuff, as I suspect there are some great sources out there. If you are so inclined, please let us know about them or add them to this Wiki: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki