DuckDuckGo is a web browser available for Android and can be used as a very efficient search engine on other operating systems. The DuckDuckGo plug-in is also available on popular web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

DuckDuckGo is a revolutionary search engine of its kind where it guarantees the privacy of your data by not storing it for their personal use and selling it to third-party vendors. Since it doesn’t store any of your information or search history, advertisers over the internet will not be able to track you.

Apart from offering these security solutions to web surfing, there are many features that make DuckDuckGo an ideal web browser. Some of these are:

!bang feature

This is one of the most appreciated features of DuckDuckGo. Suppose you frequently visit Gmail, you just have to type in ‘!gmail’ in the search area and you will be redirected to Gmail’s homepage. Convenient, isn’t it? You can try these on other sites as well, for example, ‘!gi’ for Google images, ‘!m’ for maps, ‘!w’ for Wikipedia and much more!

You can also recommend one if there is a !bang that doesn’t exist, but you think there should be a !bang thing. Pretty neat, eh?

Also read: Top 5 alternatives to Google Chrome that value your privacy

Better search result visualisation

Data visualisation is necessary to make some sense of the vast pool of data that is available out there. In this fast-paced world, we expect results to queries to be delivered promptly.

Google has got it quite right with ‘Knowledge Graph’ where instant information about your query is displayed in a manner that can be understood fast. Interestingly, DuckDuckGo was the one to start it first, and it is quite efficient too.

Keyboard shortcuts

There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts available on DuckDuckGo that make surfing on the internet more keyboard-oriented. For example, ‘Ctrl+Enter’ will open a new tab, ‘k’ to get the previous search result, ‘j’ for the next search result and much much more. You can also navigate across the page by just using your keyboard by using ‘t’ to get to the top of the page, ‘h’ to gain control to the search box and so on. Here’s a list of all the keyboard shortcuts to help you get started.

Also read: What is big data? Everything you need to know

Quicker weather-related results

With the unpredictable weather these days, this feature is certainly helpful. Just type in ‘Is it raining in –place- ’ and you will get the answer. Other such weather-related questions are also answered that are computed at Wolfrom Alpha’s website and displayed directly on the result page.

Emoticons

With new trends in emojis these days, keeping up with them can get quite difficult. Next time someone sends you an emoji you don’t know, you can better understand it by just copying and pasting it on DuckDuckGo’s search box, and the result will be displayed to you on the web page itself, no need to navigate to other pages from the main result page and thus save time.

DuckDuckGo is gaining quite a lot of popularity for the features they offer along with being a more secure way of surfing the internet, and they are coming up with such cool, convenient features daily. Give it a try, you won’t be disappointed.

Also read: What is Dark Web? Difference between Deep web and Dark web