DuckDuckGo is a rising search engine which has a 2.42% (2021) share of the US mobile search market, increasing from a mere 0.01% back in 2013. It's even more popular than big players like Yahoo! It is my personal favourite search engine, and it's full of cool shortcuts and easter eggs. It's privacy-first has a squeaky clean reputation among the community when it comes to privacy, and it claims to not sell OR collect your data (like Google, Bing, and countless others). It is also open-source, and community driven!
Here is a combined collection of cool shortcuts, tips, tricks and easter eggs hidden inside of DuckDuckGo.
Shortcuts
A few awesome shortcuts to either try out something silly, or to make your life easier.
DuckDuckGo Bangs
Just type in "!" in-front of a search to open up that website, listed are a few examples
- !devto (opens Dev)
- !mdn (opens MDN Web Docs)
- !yt (opens YouTube)
...and so on, so forth. For a list of all all of these "bangs", check out this link to view the 13,565 (and counting) bangs that DuckDuckGo.
Social Media Users
Just type in "@" in-front of a user or organisation, and watch the magic
Generate placeholder text
Just type in "lorem ipsum" in the browser.
Change casing
Not the most useful feature, but it exists. Just type in lowercase or uppercase in-front of your search and it will turn in into upper or lower case.
Generate passwords
Type in "password 50" or any other number, and it will automatically generate a secure password for you!
Generate passphrases
If those weird characters like "iCNqGvco43" are too hard to remember for you (which in all fairness should be), then you can generate a passphrases using "random passphrase" and possibly find something a bit easier to remember :D
URL encoding
You can type in "url encode" in-front of a URL to encode it!
Expand links
With DuckDuckGo, you can just type in "expand" in-front of a shortened link and it will expand it for you!
Shorten links
Just like you can expand links, you can shorten them too! DuckDuckGo uses is.gd as it's link shortener. Just type in "shorten" in-front of your link :D
Cheatsheets
Add in "cheatsheet" at the end of your search to pull up a cheatsheet.
Searching for any calendar
Typing in "calendar" will bring up a simple, boring calendar. Though DuckDuckGo can do so much more. Type in calendar followed by the date (so for example, calendar 17 August 1345) and it will pull up a calendar from there
Generate QR Codes
Add "qr" and then a link and watch it generate a QR code
Find HTML codes
Typing in "HTML chars" will bring up HTML codes for special characters!
Find colour codes
Type in "color codes"
Find certain colours
You can search up a colour code, and DuckDuckGo will tell you what the colour is/looks like.
(Thanks to the awesome people in the comments for pointing this one out 😉)
Binary conversion
Just type in binary, and add "decimal" at the end for it to convert binary into decimal!
Check the status of a website
Add in "is down?" at the end of your search in DuckDuckGo to get the results.
Easter eggs
Some cool little Easter Eggs in DuckDuckGo:
...and that's about it. Thanks for reading or scrolling down here - if I missed something, or you want to show me something else, feel free to comment below. I'll be replying to all of them 😉
Top comments (21)
Another cool feature: if you look up "css animations", it respond with some admittedly cool css animations
Just noticed that one! Thanks for pointing it out.
I've always known DDG to be full of easter eggs, some of which don't last forever. There's one I spotted in the wild some years ago that doesn't still work (last I checked), but I somehow thought to capture a screenshot at the time:
I wasn't aware DDG processed searches differently when the last search term is "cheatsheet". Clearly I've used that feature hundreds of times without realizing it!
You seem to be an older DuckDuckGo user, nice!
and yeah, I wasn't aware of it until very recently (as I read in another blog post about it), it's a very handy thing indeed :D
Here's another color-related utility: duckduckgo.com/?q=%23cf4f23
Awesome. I'll add it with credits to you :)
Humorous, maybe unintentionally, not sure
I don't really get how it's funny... lol.
You look up Avogadro's number and get Avogadro's phone number.
Avogadro's number is an important physical constant.
Oh, haha. I didn't know much about that
just like how I don't know much about anythingVery Nice
Appreciate it!!!!
This is awesome!
Thanks for your kind words :D
Thank you so much ❤️
oh damn these are actually pretty neat! thank you for sharing!
This is actually so sick ha
need this as a cheat sheet itself!
Hehe thanks! Made me happy :)
Thanks so much! Made by day :)