Duck Google, here comes an Open Source Search engine

[caption id="attachment_2118" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Clean searches"][/caption]

If you're a little concerned about the Google monolith, especially the way the company has infiltrated every facet of our lives with often meaningless searches, and raw data which grows increasingly less useful as the famous page algorithm becomes ever less relevant in a semantic and heuristically challenged world, then you will pleased to find Duck Duck Go, a  search engine showing some promise. Yes, unlike the closed behemoth of Google, it is based on open source, not simply page popularity.

Among the  strengths touted by the developers of DuckDuckgo are

• No tracking- guaranteed  privacy.


• Relevant results- they claim to eliminate over 60m useless sites for some searches.


• The DuckDuckbot, the name of their crawler, identifies sites automatically without you needing to add your site to their index like Google.


• Encrypted search using "https"


• In addition to their DuckDuckbot, they also get their results from "many sources including crowd-sourced sites,  BOSS & Bing.

Some neat stuff you can do with DuckDuckGo

!amazon bags searches Amazon.com for bags, directly. We call this search syntax "!bang", and it works for 100s of sites:

• Most big sites work, e.g. !youtube


• Most generic keywords work too, e.g. !images


• There are also shorter versions, e.g. !g !i !yt


• Just '! ' will take you to the first result.


• more about this here

THANKS Ghabuntu