In the early 2010s, everyone used Google for searches. Shortly after, several scandals came to light, almost all of them, if not all, concerning for privacy. Around that time, a minor war also began between Google and Apple (the Cupertino company created its own Maps and removed Google Maps and YouTube as default apps in iOS 6), so many of us decided to switch search engines. The main beneficiary was... DuckDuckGo, without a doubt.
For my part, I did several tests. First I used Yahoo!, but it had several problems with passwordsIt got to the point where I switched from my personal system to using password managers. I can tell you what that system was because I don't use it anymore: the username was the same, an email account I also no longer use, and the password was the website's name with uppercase consonants and lowercase vowels followed by my full date of birth. Later I used Bing, but Microsoft as a company isn't much better than Google, and I finally switched to DuckDuckGo.
DuckDuckGo's !bangs are its best asset…
When you switch to something new, everything you see is good. DuckDuckGo's results aren't too bad, so I stuck with it. Besides, when you use it for a while and find out that it uses something called !bangsYou don't want anything else anymore. Several years ago I wrote about it, making it clear that this whole !bang thing is very productive.
What is a !bang? It's a bit like an onomatopoeia for something very fast ("boom, here it is"). For example, if you want to search for kittens on YouTube, you type "!yt kittens" (without the quotes) in the URL bar and it will search for "kittens" on youtube.com. There are hundreds of examples, and it's easy to get used to.
…but they are not exclusive to them
Bangs are such a good idea that we also find them in Brave Search, Yandex, Ecosia, and Kagi, among others. Basically, all the search engines that want to help us, and Google isn't among them, nor, at least for now, is it my choice as my new default search engine.
In addition, there are browser extensions, such as Yang! (here the link to the Firefox version) that the !bangs add if a browser is not supported.
Startpage is my new default search engine
What has happened recently is that I've realized I was wasting time using DuckDuckGo. Its results are better if we are "geeky" or tech-obsessed users.It shows a lot of content from Reddit, Stack Overflow, and similar sites. But lately, I've been using "!g search" a lot, which means that if I have to constantly search on another engine, I don't fit the DuckDuckGo user profile.
So I thought about going back to Google, but I don't want to. Then I remembered Startpage, which basically displays Google results, but privately.They have an agreement with them, and also with Bing for fill-in (the results are from Google; Bing only fills in the gaps, it needs to be made clear), and it's a reality. So my personal choice at the moment is Startpage.
In addition to search results, Startpage allows us to visit websites anonymously. This increases privacy and sometimes allows us to bypass website blocks.
The downside of Startpage is that it doesn't allow the use of !bangs, so I had to install an extension in my web browsers, specifically the aforementioned Yang!. Yang! allows the use of DuckDuckGo's !bangs, although it defaults to Kagi's. After looking at what's available, I haven't needed DuckDuckGo's so far, and I even think that for general use, Kagi's are more intuitive and easier to use.
I haven't completely abandoned DuckDuckGo
This entire article isn't an attack on DuckDuckGo. It's just to talk about other options, especially if you don't fit a specific profile. But I still use DuckDuckGo for some things. For example, its video results, which let you watch YouTube content without cookies or ads. I also have several custom searches to summarize pages and get explanations from its DuckAI.
The duck has a lot of good features, but I don't quite fit the profile of one of its users. Therefore, I've had to look for alternatives as my default search engine.