Tuesday 27 July 2010

DuckDuckGo, a *fast* and *awesome* web search engine (in Perl!)

More than often we hear people in the Perl community asking for more Perl applications and solutions instead of just modules. Well, Gabriel Weinberg (YEGG, on CPAN) did just that!

His new creation is called DuckDuckGo (DDG for short), a search engine with lots of cool features, like:

  • It's blazing fast! Google's search results doesn't quite make it for me, but I could get to the "right" result in the list (even in other pages) really fast, so is was one of the biggest blockers for me in switching to other engines. No more :-)

  • Official sites are labelled and displayed on top.

  • No ads above results, and actual privacy! Unlike Google, DDG does not track users, nor displays "sponsored links" on top of your search.

  • Zero-click info is an amazing way to find what you're looking for in your search without having to follow any links. Let DDG do the hard work for you!

  • Several goodies ready for you: go to the first result prepending a "!" to your search, find your IP address by simply querying "ip", get random numbers, test a regexp, and much, much more!

  • site:, filetype:, inurl:, AND, OR, and all your favorite advanced operators work too!

  • Keyboard shortcuts and customizations let you setup fonts, colors and much more! If you don't like to use the mouse, you can do everything via the keyboard.

  • Encrypted search, just use https:// instead of http://
Read the About and FAQ for more features and information, and give it a try. You might be surprised :-)

Want to help promote more Perl-based solutions? Sick and tired of Google search? Switch now!


Oh, did I mention it is **fast** ??

Cheers!