usernamenumber | Duck... Duck... Go!

So, ok, I like Google, I really do. I love gmail, and my social life would be non-existant (or, un-thinkably, even more chaotic) without gCal. Back in the day, I even wrote a lengthy defence (of sorts) of gMail against its critics, by which I still stand.

That said, competition is good, and while it's really cool when a company like Google can dominate a breadth of markets just by virtue of being so damn good at what they do, it also makes it all the more impressive when a little guy comes along and innovates in a way that lets it keep up.

Enter Duck Duck Go. They are part their own engine with their own crawler, and part an intelligence layer on top of results from a bunch of sources (including engines like Yahoo and Bing, results from which are included with attribution, and reference sites like Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha) which does a really good job, in my experience, of sorting and presenting those results with a whole bunch of really clever interface goodies, like their !bang syntax, a "why hadn't I thought of that??"-incudingly simple mechanism for honing searches.

On top of all that, they only do search, which means there's no such thing as a Duck Duck Go account for data to be associated with. That, plus the fact that they do not record IP addresses means that your anonymous data really is anonymous. See their impressively extensive privacy page for more.

I added DDG to Firefox's search bar months ago, have been using it as my default engine since then, and have been very pleased with the results, so I'd encourage others to give them a try!