We live in a world where the name Google is synonymous with web search, and if anyone hopes of competing for a sliver of search market share, they certainly have to innovate and do things differently than Google.
Enter DuckDuckGo. The idea of DuckDuckGo is that search results are put in a more logical order and presented in a way that is visually appealing. It also attempts to be more transparent than Google, by keeping user information private and not tracking users’ web habits.
The main idea of the search engine is what they call “Zero-click” search. When you search for something (I used Facebook as the example below), it compiles the information and uses human-based input to give users what is generally considered the most relevant information. In my demonstration you can see how it provides a link to Wikipedia to learn more about the search item, and provides links to the official website beneath it. I’ve found their results to be better than Google in many cases, not only in simplicity but relevancy. It’s also worth noting that there is a substantially lower amount of spam sites clogging up the results.
From an open source perspective, DuckDuckGo is about as close as possible to an ideal open source-based search engine, using “FreeBSD for the main operating system and Ubuntu for EC2 failover images.” It’s also worth noting that Perl is used on the backend.
There are many impressive things about DuckDuckGo. The way it presents information, the way it handles user information, and the way it embraces open source indicates that they’re wanting to do this right. Not only that, it’s clean, fresh, and not bogged down with ads and spam. I recommend using it for a week straight and see what you think. In my opinion, it’s on par with Google (perhaps better), and miles ahead of the rest.
You can try it out at DuckDuckGo.com