Find Out DuckDuckGo Features You Should Use

In case you didn’t already know DuckDuckGo, this is a tool known mainly for its focus on privacy, and it is an alternative to Google, Bing and Yahoo, which is very popular today. However, if you’re new, let’s look at some features you can put into practice to enhance your online browsing experience.

Bangs

This is one of the features that is most convenient for users, since you don’t need to leave DuckDuckGo to be able to search a particular website for whatever you need to search for. You can use a blast and then be redirected to the search results page, eg “!w” for Wikipedia, you will most likely be redirected to the specific Wikipedia entry in your search instead of another search page, this way you can save a lot of time.

To keep in mind

Bangs need to have an exclamation point in front of them to be searchable, also as of December 2022 there are over 13,500 bangs where you can find one for almost every popular website. On the other hand, in case you want website or service specific results directly in DuckDuckGo, you can use the “site:” search operator and do the search you need.

Instant Answers

With DuckDuckGo you can have direct answers to your queries, plus instant answers are available for a variety of queries as there are more than 100 sources. Similarly, with this option you can generate passwords, change the case of a lot of text, solve anagrams, shorten or expand links.

Also, with this feature you can also know if a website is down, generate QR codes, offer loan calculations, and recommend alternative software and services.

Duck.com Email Protection

You can sign up for the app or extension in your browser, then have a forwarding address @duck.com, it receives the emails on your behalf, then removes the trackers and then forwards them to a mailbox of your choice. Also another option that there is with this option, is the ability to create random aliases with the purpose that these aliases are shared with spam, untrustworthy or random websites; these emails sent under the aliases are removed from the trackers and then forwarded to your primary email.

Since privacy is the most important thing on this platform, only your aliases and primary email ID are kept as it does not store any of your emails.

App Tracking Protection for Android

This feature is unique to Android, as it can stop constant snooping by third-party trackers on your phone’s apps. Many apps and websites collect details such as location, email address, phone number, time zone, and device fingerprint to create a profile, among others. However, you can use app tracking protection by installing the DuckDuckGo Android application on your phone.

Cheatsheets

This is one of the lesser known features of DuckDuckGo, however it can be quite useful. Using this function you can find keyboard shortcuts for your application or favorite applications and also learn the basics of popular programming languages.

How to do it

DuckDuckGo will list common shortcuts or the most basic of your search term, you just have to type a cheat sheet next to a query for an app, language, or service, and for example, when you search for a cheat sheet for Chrome, the app offers all common shortcuts for the web browser where you are.