Have you ever tried Duckduckgo's search engine?

Yes. It is pretty good. I have used it and Gibiru and generally liked both of them.

It’s all I use.

Yes. I set that as my default on all my devices: phone laptop, tablet. Occasionally, I use goog if i want more results.

I can only see positives to using duckduckgo. i have not seen any downsides.
Do it!

Yes…I use it all the time on my desktop. I know it blocks pop-ups and supposedly doesn’t track your likes and dislikes. It does keep your history, but that isn’t the same thing. We did have a question awhile back about the bias of search engines and I pointed out Google Chrome pulls mostly liberal articles, Duckduckgo doesn’t…it seems a little more balanced. So if that is important to you (seeing more liberal articles), you may not want to use it.

I use Duckduckgo too. It’s great if you want to maintain privacy. And it also allows you to download images into your devices in their original resolution, something Google disabled years ago.

However, there is actually one setback. Because Duckduckgo doesn’t track you, the results become less relevant to you than Google. This one is pretty hard to explain, but basically when you use Google, it will combine your location and search histories to show you the results that it thinks are the most useful for you on the top. Duckduckgo doesn’t track you, so it bases its results solely on your keywords. I don’t know about others but that’s what I can see from my testing.

So all in all, I use Duckduckgo when I need privacy, and Google when I need to optimize my search results.

It’s my default.

One handy protip is if you’re using DuckDuckGo and you aren’t getting the results you want and want to run the same search with Google, just type G! in front of your search and it’ll anonymously search those keywords on Google for you.

^ @gorillapaws THAT IS FANTASTIC!!! I just tried G! and it worked beautifully!
I need to remember this! Heck, we ALL need to remember this trick!

I’m putting G! on a sticky note on my laptop. Thank you!

I went to duckduckgo’s hints and tricks site and saw they havea function called “Bangs”. You can search specific sites by putting an ” !” in front of a certain letter to search that site. !a searches amazon, !g search google, etc

G! works, but !G works with even more options! Wow!

Here is a complete list?
I will suggest they add this site.

(I just tried to add but was unsuccessful. .I didn’t do it right. Maybe someone competent can try. )

^ As great as that sounds, did you read the fine print or maybe not so fine print??? It seems EVERY site has a disclaimer & DDG’s reads ”Remember, though, because your search is actually taking place on that other site, you are subject to that site’s policies, including its data collection practices.” IF I’m reading that right, google will still be collecting my data as if I had searched on their site. So, I will do my DDG searches on their site & IF I decide that I want a google search, I am just as safe doing it straight from google’s site.It seems that we’re only safe doing a straight DDG search!!!

I’d like to THANK everyone for their input!!! It’s not as customized as google or some of the others; but, I would expect that since they don’t track my every move. So far, I’ve found everything I’ve been searching for although not as organized as google, I don’t mind giving up that organization in exchange for google not knowing my every move!!!

I’ve learned something new today & that in itself is a good thing!!!