Tag: safari

I wrote this inspired by Fred Wilson’s post on DuckDuckGo. It occurred to me that a lot of people may not know about DDG and if you do, you may not be able to figure out how to use it as the default search engine for Safari. Why would you want to use DDG instead of Google, Bing or Yahoo? Mostly because of the better results, but their awesome privacy policy, which differs quite a bit from the others out there, is certainly a plus as well.

DuckDuckGo has been my default search engine for all of my browsers (Chrome, Firefox and Safari). It’s simple to make it the default for every browser except Safari. I’m not crazy about any of the methods DDG recommends, so I created my own method using the incredble Omnibar extension, which you should already be using. Make sure you download and install it before proceeding as the following instructions assume you have it installed.

1. Select the text in your address bar. You can generally do this by triple clicking on whatever URL is currently in your address bar.
2. Right-click on the text in the address bar and select ‘Edit Omnibar Search Providers’.
3. Click on the plus sign to add an additional search provider.
4. Rename the search provider DuckDuckGo.
5. You can designate your own search letter or phrase to easily use other search engines with DDG. I just use “d”, though I rarely use other seach engines.
6. In the URL field, just use “https://duckduckgo.com/?q={searchTerms}” and press Enter/Return.
7. Select DuckDuckGo and click on the “Set as Deafult” button then click the “Done” button. 

Congratulations! You’re now using the best search engine with the best results and you’re not being tracked. Please take a moment to reblog this and share it everywhere your friends are.