I have recently switched from using Google for searching the web, mostly because they monitor and log searches but also because their competitors have become a bit more innovative.

My new default search engine is DuckDuckGo (not the best name, I might add) which is a bit more useful than Google. It may not have as many “fun” easter eggs as Google does but it’s way more customizable. It also supports what they call “bang syntax”, if I for example need to look up a function in the php documentation I can just search for “!php strpos” and get taken directly to the appropriate page. This is especially useful when setting DuckDuckGo (they are in a serious need of a name change) as the default search provider, allowing me to search Google, IMDb, Yahoo, Wikipedia and a lot more by just adding a bang and a few letters at the end of my query directly in the location bar.

Setting it up as default is super-easy as they have very informative articles on how to configure Chrome and Firefox as well as many more.

Did I also mention that monitoring their users is against their policy?

P.S. I’m very much aware that this post sounds like a cheap ad but I sincerely think that more people should be aware of alternative search engines as many have grown to believe that Google is the only option.