Random Technology Ramblings

I have recently recently started to use a new search engine, that’s right no more Bing for me… OK Bing is my home page in Internet Explorer because I love the pictures but I don’t use IE much any more.

As you can see from the image the new engine is called DuckDuckGo, I can’t recall how I found it but I think from the start I totally dug the name. After using is for a week or so I learned how some of the usability features really make me more productive.

Lets compare I did three searches for the term “code camp” on DuckDuckGo, Google & Bing. I like that with DuckDuckGo I get Zero-click Info a set of refined results and blow the fold (indicated with a line) all of the results (not sure what they call this). Also you get privacy all the data collected is anonymous, if you don’t know why this is important then go read 1984!

I recently installed IE9 Beta and realized I had not set the IE default search to use DuckDuckGo yet so I did by using the manual page that Microsoft provides to Add Search Providers to Internet Explorer after not finding it in there IE Add-ons Gallery. I guessed most people would not go though that hassle so I blew out the cobwebs and did some IE customizations creation and created an IE search provider. I have submitted it to the add-ons gallery but I am sure it will take a while to get approved so for now you can click this to add the IE search provider for DuckDuckGo. Go ahead it’s safe, trust me…

Ok I don’t trust anyone and you should not either so let me show you what you will be down loading:

File: duckduckgo.osd

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>DuckDuckGo</ShortName>
  <Description>DuckDuckGo provider</Description>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
  <Url type="text/html" template="http://duckduckgo.com/?q={searchTerms}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>
Enjoy! 
                            

                Tags: IE, Search