Giving DuckDuckGo Another Chance

A few days ago, I wrote about my quest for a better search engine. For the past few months, I had been using Kagi, but I have since canceled the subscription. As a consequence, I returned back to DuckDuckGo. However, I felt it wasn’t able to satisfy my needs… but was I right?

I have received a few answer e-mails and I decided to give DuckDuckGo one more chance. In one of this e-mails, there was a tip, which revealed to be very useful: Christof suggested turning on the country toggle in order to improve the local results.

I have no idea how I missed the existence of such toggle, since it’s a very in the UI, but it seems to do the trick. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to affect more generic searches, so I can just keep it on the whole time.

And if I want to get Google’s results, but in a more private way, I can also just use !s to check on Startpage, just like Kev suggested. I have been doing this for the past few days and haven’t had much issues since.

A good thing about this is that I don’t need to go figure out how to make Startpage the default search engine in my current browsers, since that’s also another nightmare. Fortunately, DuckDuckGo is available as option in the browsers with opinions about which search engines the user should be able to use.