Design & User ExperienceĭDG succeeds in offering users simplicity in both design and experience. I’m looking forward to monitoring the DuckDuckGo forums for new plugin releases as the search engine’s popularity grows. Pretty cool, huh? You may liken these plugins to Google’s Search Features however, the open source nature of DuckDuckGo (coupled with its enthusiastic community of developers) spells endless possibilities. Spice plugins, like the xkcd plugin that creates the result below, make JavaScript-based calls to external APIs. JavaScript, Perl, Ruby, Node, and Python are among the languages that appear in the list. There are four different plugin types that developers can choose from, each of which has specific programming language(s). Looking for a way to really impact search results that thousands of users see every day? Developing a DuckDuckGo plugin may be in your future! Making part of a project open source allows outside developers ( maybe even you!) to contribute code and add functionality to the live product.

I referenced the whole open source plugin thing in the beginning of this post, and I think it’s worth revisiting. In my mind, a cordial, user-friendly duck is saying, “Hey man, given that you’ve reached the bottom of our results page, it’s possible that we don’t have what you’re looking for.

Try Google / Bing / More…’ at the bottom of the results page. When I query for a senseless string – ‘ sleepy buckets of golden rice frogs‘, for instance – I get ‘No more results. This selfless, user-centered approach to online search is omnipresent – making an appearance even in search results for abstract queries.

Duck search bar