Maybe online privacy isn’t something you think outside of keeping your credit cards and banking information out of the hands of hackers.
iOS offers an option to change your search engine under Settings ? Safari ? Search Engine. There you can choose from:
- Yahoo
- Bing
- DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is the only search engine in the list that doesn’t track and store your search results. That means they aren’t targeting you with ads or trying to sell your data to marketers.
I like having more control over who has my information and search history, but what sold me on DuckDuckGo is a unique feature called bangs.
DuckDuckGo enables you to search certain sites directly by using an exclamation point followed directly by the website shortcut.
For example, if you want to search for Nike shoes on Amazon, you type !a Nike shoes and DuckDuckGo automatically redirects you to Amazon.
DuckDuckGo supports over 7,500 bang searches, and I bet a number of your favorite sites are already listed there.
What makes this feature extra cool is using it from Spotlight on iOS.
- Pull down from any screen to bring up the search bar
- Type your bang search (e.g. !w Akron, Ohio)
- Click Search Web
- Boom. Your on the website (in this case Wikipedia) that you used the bang search for.
Here’s a video of the bang search in action on iOS.
Sometimes DuckDuckGo doesn’t work as well as Google for search (especially when looking up Flight status). Never fear! You can use the Google bang search !g Delta flight 122 and voilà, you’re taken to Google.
The extra good news about this is that DuckDuckGo uses an encrypted Google search, so that your results aren’t traced. The power of Google with the privacy of DuckDuckGo.
Here are the bangs I use most frequently:
- !g Google encrypted search
- !w Wikipedia
- !yt YouTube
- !a Amazon
- !wirecutter The Wirecutter