This search engine isn't fowl

Dear PropellerHeads: A friend and I were debating some fact last week and he used DuckDuckGo instead of Google to settle the dispute. What's his problem?

A: Well, at least you know he isn't from Minnesota so he has that going for him. Duck, Duck, Grey Duck? Really?

DuckDuckGo (www.duckduckgo.com) is a trendy search engine for the web that is reminding a lot of talking heads of the early days of Google with its simplicity and accuracy. It even mocks Google with its I'm Feeling Duckyoption. How long until Google sues over that?

I say trendy because it is growing at a rate of about 50 percent per month and is now processing 1.5 million search requests daily. But to put that in perspective, Google will receive that many requests in a less than a minute, so I don't think Google is shaking in their shoes just yet.

But as Google has grown, so has the amount of clutter on their search results and that is why DuckDuckGo (DDG) is appealing to an increasing number of webizens. Simplicity is supreme. No auto-completion, no site previews, no links to other Google services. About as fancy as it gets is the good old infinite scroll of results instead of pages.

One thing that DDG attempts to do is offer a zero-click response to your search query. This means instead of just giving you a list of sites that it thinks will help you, it actually tries to give you an answer so you don't have to go to those sites. Google does this as well to a certain degree, but DDG seems to offer even more options.

Their Goodies page gives a full list of their options. Some that I found most salivating were finding nutritional information for food, dates of significance, looking up geographical details for locations, random dice rolls, passwords, and other geeky transformations like MD5.

DDG accomplishes this by partnering with a few dozen quality sources. Most of these tend to be crowd-sourced wikis like Wikipedia, but it makes great use of Wolfram Alpha, a principal driver behind the iPhone's Siri assistant.

Another goal of DDG is to filter out the websites whose seemingly only purpose is to either advertise or to just rank highly in the search results. Therefore, some people think DDG returns higher quality results than Google does.

One thing I like about how DDG's search results are presented is the inclusion of the site's icon next to each match. This provides a quick visual indicator as to the source of the match without requiring a full preview.

DDG offers a number of shortcuts to search other sites directly with their !Bang syntax. Want to search Google from DDG, just add a "!g" to your search term and bang, you are there! There are shortcuts for Amazon, Bing, Costco and a thousand others - too many to actually remember, but helpful if you tend to always search the same sites.

Another reason some find DDG pleasing is its emphasis on privacy. Whereas Google will track just about everything to feed its advertising bread and butter, DDG doesn't store anything about you, ever. No IP addresses, no browser details, no saved searches, nada.

Even cookies are greatly curtailed and are principally used to store what settings you have selected for the search results. By the way, DDG offers a ton more settings than Google to get the search page working exactly as you'd like it to.

The proof is in the pudding, as they say. How do DDG results compare to Google's? The answer, not surprisingly, is that it depends. The more obscure the information you are looking for, the less likely DuckDuckGo will be able to help you. However, for simple facts and figures, it is right up there with Google and in many cases is even better.

If the search market were a game of Duck, Duck, Goose, then Google has been circling the competition for years. However, DuckDuckGo might be able to tap Google's head and make it start doing the chasing.

When the PropellerHeads at Data Directions aren't busy with their IT projects, they love to answer questions on business or consumer technology. Email them to [email protected] or contact us at Data Directions Inc., 8510 Bell Creek Road, Mechanicsville, VA 23116. Visit our website at www.askthepropellerheads.com.