While checking my Twitter feed I came across a post from Smashing Magazine that said ‘DuckDuckGo: a nice new search engine, useful for programmers and designers’, so I checked it out, ran a few searches and was pleasantly surprised with the results, it was that good I may consider making it my search engine of choice.

Before I go on I would just like to talk a little about Google which may just clarify why I am considering moving away.  Google has been the search front runner for such along time it seemed unlikely any other service could mount an effective challenge, even with Wolfram Alpha and Bing hitting the scene Google just kept on going.  Recently however, Bing started to take a bigger share of the search market and weirdly Google instead of leading the way changed its search results page to feel more like Bing’s; combine this with the increasing advertising that haunts Google could they just be starting to lose their way?

DuckDuckGo (strange name I know!) offers a more streamlined search facility meaning more appropriate results,  so to test the theory I ran a few simple searches both in Google and DuckDuckGo; in most cases it beat Google on appropriacy giving me only useful links and more importantly no advertising.  As a web designer trying to find those useful little code snippets or tutorials can be a chore but since I have been trialing DuckDuckGo things have felt just a little more direct. So far the only draw-back I can see is speed, sometimes DuckDuckGo lacks the immediacy of Google when clicking through to an appropraite result.

I don’t think Google is under threat yet, I have fallen for the false promises of other search engines before and always go back to the comfort of Google; yet I do feel it is time for something new and maybe DuckDuckGo is it?