DuckDuckGo on CNBC: We’ve grown 600% since NSA surveillance news broke

The results on DuckDuckGo still kinda suck but I use it daily. If I need something that it doesn’t show, I just move over to Google for that particular search.

there is a sad fact that not even duck duck go can protect your nsa spying. In fact I am not surprised they use it. Because of the data mining software installed in nearly every website out there, even clearing a cache, or deleting cookies and surfing histories won’t stop tracking. Neither does using IP masking software

I personally find Boolean and other advanced search syntax much more useful than the !bangs concept could be for me. It frustrates me that oftentimes among the two, only Google supports many advanced search queries. Some examples:

Example 1: “site:”

For searching a site directly from the search engine; better than !bangs because same root for every site, no need to memorise specific site abbreviations. You can also write only the domain name to search multiple websites like normal, but only .gov or .edu or .org sites or whatever other type of site you want.

Example 2: Boolean operators, such as “AND”, “OR”, parentheses “( )”, and the hyphen “-”

Can narrow down and/or expand search context as needed; flexible and powerful for getting exactly what you want.

Example 3: “filetype:”

Search only for specific file types, such as .jpeg, .pdf, .exe, etc.

Example 4: Wildcard operator ( * )

Expand your context to include certain unknowns (for example, the search query ” proto* ” would search all results that include any word that starts with “proto-“. Or, another example would be the search query ” m*lted ” will search for anything that fits that term, but with the asterisk (the wildcard) meaning any possible letter, so it could give results such as “molted”, “melted”, “malted”, “molt”, “molten”, and any number of other possibilities.

Example 5: Quotation marks (” “)

Typically (but not always) these mean an exact search. So searching for

“The dog ran over the fence and ate the moon”

should not result in search results that include the words but not necessarily in the same order, but it should tell the search engine to search exactly as shown.

Example 6: metadata-specific operators (“inurl:”, “intitle:”, “inbody:”, etc.)

Searches queries that are in specifically in the URL, or specifically in the the title or the body.

Exampole 7: Number ranges ( .. )

Searches queries between the two number values. This works for search within particular price ranges (eg, $25..$50) or even date ranges (eg, 1967..1971)

So, for example, say if I wanted to search for

» Individuals in the US Revolutionary War named Benjamin

» But who were not named George Washington,

» Yet I wanted only DIRECT links to PDF files from .edu sites

» Whose titles included the phrase “continental army”

» and was published between 2001 and 2009

I could do the following search query:

Benjamin AND “United States” AND “revolutionary war” -“Franklin” site:edu intitle:”continental army” filetype:pdf 2001..2009

…Yeah, I love DuckDuckGo, and I would love to get back to using it, but seriously… Let’s see DDG do that.