DuckDuckGo Features That Make It Unique

In DuckDuckGo’s earlier days, it was regarded as a “stripped-down” version of Google. Privacy advocates were becoming concerned with Google’s long list of other services besides its search engine. Google was once clean and simple, but had become covered with ads and other issues. Although DuckDuckGo was once a very simple metasearch engine, it has become especially feature-rich over the past few years.

Instant Answers

Many DuckDuckGo searches include “Instant Answers”, which give you answers to your questions directly on the search results page. The search engine draws instant answers from over 100 sources. DuckDuckGo has over 1200 Instant Answers according to it’s developer page. These answers include coding cheat sheets, games and abbreviations.

Tons of Other Embedded Answers

• Rhymes
• Loan Calculator
• Calendar
• Lorem Ipsum Generator
• URL-encoding
• Binary to Decimal Converter

!Bangs

!Bangs let you directly search other websites from DuckDuckGo. For example, type “!amazon” before your search term and you can search Amazon without having to navigate to Amazon.com first. If DuckDuckGo is set as your homepage this can be a very useful tool. However, we have to point out that !bangs are not “private” searches. Even though you’re searching from DuckDuckGo, your search is passed through the website you’re searching. This is a convenience tool, but it loses DuckDuckGo’s privacy protection. According to its informational page about !bangs, there are over 12,000 bangs and that number is constantly growing because anyone can add a !bang to DuckDuckGo.

Read More: Why Does DuckDuckGo Offer a Google !Bang? — DigiPrivacy

Is It Raining & Weather Search

On DuckDuckGo, you can search for “Is It Raining” and it will tell you whether or not it’s raining in your location. For other private search engines, this would be an issue…