DuckDuckGo Things

Heya. This is a light post about a the search engine DuckDuckGo.

Day to day we (I) use Google to search stuff. There’s a lot of alternatives, but the most appealing one is DuckDuckGo. This search engine combines a good set of results, it does not track you (so they say), and has a set of special features. I want to highlight some of its features here. Unluckily nobody paid me to do so 😛

Stack Overflow Results

Something engrained in DuckDuckGo. When the top search result is something from stackOverflow you’ll see the top response (or at least I think it’s the top) with no need to open StackOverflow at all.

ASCII table

Search for ASCII table, and you’ll get an ASCII table. It is the image of asciitable.com, but it just lies there for you 😀

HEX to ASCII

Used a couple of times. Somebody sends me a trace of an ASCII protocol in plain HEX. I’m not that good reading ASCII from HEX (maybe I should), but pasting that to DuckDuckGo gave me the answer.

Web Coloring

Get a representation for an input RGB color. What is neat is also having the Complementary and Analogous colors.

The Bang

It supports bang search. This is something I loved from Firefox for a long time. You can perform a search on Wolfram alpha directly from DuckDuckGo using !wa speed of light. This will redirect you to WolframAlpha, is not as nice as having the result in the same website, but very practical.

Dictionary

This is not anything special, you can do it in Google too. The search engine is a fast dictionary. My native language is not English, so I actually use this feature quite a lot when reading documents with more exotic words. Or when I’m writing a blog post.

Cheat sheets

It has cheatsheets. I type vim cheat sheet, and I get this:

I type C cheat sheet and.. well, you get the idea…

Of course, those are just screenshots, check the full result by yourself!.

Lorem Ipsum

I don’t use that now. But on the past (when writing website protoypes) more often than not I needed to fill random text.

StopWatch

I wear a watch with stopwatch (not a smart one), so I don’t feel the need to use this. But since once I looked for a stopwatch in DuckDuckGo and it presented one immediately seems only fair to point it out.

Last

Probably it has a lot of other features that may be useful for somebody. I realized that it is a very nice search engine if you are a developer, it combines direct results like css font, and if it’s not smart enough to do so it’s highly possible that the first result will be from StackOverflow. When I thought about that and start searching, I stumbled upon Duck Duck Hack 😀

Well, that is all for today, happy Ducking!