Plus, we can’t help but be wooed by the mobile app, which, on top of being safe, feels ultra-light and quick. While search results may not always look as busy and vibrant as on other search engines, the information you’re returned is often just as thorough and reliable. And the fact that the search engine has limited options isn’t a bother instead, it’s a nice change to be able to download, personalize and start using software in under 30 minutes. We love what DuckDuckGo strives for – worry-free anonymity and safety online. When I played around with searching for similar keywords (like “Beach Boys albums,” I had richer results from DuckDuckGo, similar to what I saw on Google and Yahoo the first time around.

That shouldn’t be too much of a turn-off, though. Yahoo has nicer-looking search results as well (Image credit: Yahoo) It has the duck mascot pop up with chat bubbles to show you around the app, and everything is fast and smooth. The mobile app is especially nice to use, though. Other than that, searching with DuckDuckGo is the same as with any other search engine – you enter a word or phrase, hit Search and it does its thing. You don’t even have to find the menus in your browser preferences – DuckDuckGo opens them for you. The app will walk you through how to do that. When you download the app for Mac, you have to enable the features within your browser. It’s super easy – on Safari, you just click the magnifying glass in the search bar and then choose DuckDuckGo from the drop-down. This completely took the guesswork out of how to find and download the right version for my computer.Īfter clicking the button to add it, I got a pop-up with the steps to set DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. Since I was using the Safari browser, I had customized “Add DuckDuckGo to Safari” buttons on pretty much every page of their website (and then tailored for Chrome (opens in new tab) when I checked out the site using that browser (opens in new tab)). You can set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine in most browsers including Safari and Google Chrome (Image credit: Apple) In use

Duck n go