Duckduckgo: A search engine like Google, circa 2000

For most net users, Google is embedded into muscle memory. Duckduckgo should prove a useful alternative when you’re trying to search for a genuine review or a feature on a particular topic. Those with privacy concerns will be glad to know that the site does not collect information about the user. The search engine seems to reward human data aggregators and websites, allowing you to explicitly filter out shopping results.

One of my favourite alternatives to Google is wikipedia,  because it’s edited by human beings and has serves up aggregated and relevant information in a few keystrokes. Wikipedia seems to excellently synopsize whatever I want to know about an topic, be it movies, music, a person, specs on a phone handset. Duckduckgo’s web crawler apparently compiles data from crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia, in addition to Yahoo! Search BOSS, and Bing. The mix is right, for the most part. I tried it out against a few products, and emerged more satisfied than Google search. I found a genuine review of the Samsung Spica, which I've been looking to buy when it gets the 2.1 update. I've also reached the conclusion that there are no real reviews of the Sony DXR-SX44/E camcorder, or the Micromax Q5 dual sim phone in India (except for this one!).

DuckDuckGo’s user interface is clean and clutter free, and provides spam free search results. The site Auto-fetches search results as you scroll below, so you get an endless array of search results without having to click unnecessarily. The website has a toolbar add-on for Firefox, which blocks spam and parked domains. I’ve added ddw as a smartsearch string on Firefox. The search engine also has a simple setting parameters page that let you contextualise results by country, and tweak the look and feel of the page. There’s also a shortened version of the same url, in case you find duckduckgo too long to type: dukgo.com

Tip: Srikanth