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IxQuick and DuckDuckGo, alternative search engines
Posted by Bob Jonkman on April 30th, 2012
IxQuick search engine
I’m concerned about Google having a monopoly on search, and tracking their users for search terms, and much more.
So use another search engine.
I’ve been using IxQuick on-and-off for years, and almost exclusively for the last six months: https://ixquick.com/
First, I set the default Search Bar plugin to IxQuick from one of the many selections at the Mycroft project .
Then I also set Firefox’s address bar to do keyword searches on IxQuick:
- type about:config in the address bar
- Acknowledge the potential for damaging your system
- Search for the keyword.URL entry
- Change it to https://ixquick.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=
Now any keywords you type into the address bar will be looked up by IxQuick.
IxQuick is a metasearch engine, which searches All the Web, Digg, Qkport, Ask/Teoma, EntireWeb, Wikipedia, Bing, Gigablast, Yahoo, Cuil and Open Directory. Almost everything except Google. IxQuick claims that it does NOT collect or share your personal information
, and keeps logs no longer than 48 hours.
All in all, I’ve been very pleased with the results IxQuick provides.
DuckDuckGo search engine
does not collect or share personal information.
To put DuckDuckGo in the Search Bar, browse to the DuckDuckGo site, pull down the list of search engines, then click on “Add DuckDuckGo”.
To set up DuckDuckGo as the default search engine for the address bar:
- type about:config in the address bar
- Acknowledge the potential for damaging your system
- Search for the keyword.URL entry
- Change it to https://duckduckgo.com/?q=
I haven’t used DuckDuckGo much at all, but I’ve only heard favourable reports…
Note that there are many other references to Google in the
about:config
settings, so if you make only these changes you’re still not Google Free.
–Bob.
Screenshot images created by Bob Jonkman, and released to the Public Domain
May 5th, 2012 at 9:28 pm
Kete Foy dents:
Update 24 August 2012: The Seeks Project is , and has an Identi.ca group at !seeks.
August 23rd, 2012 at 2:51 am
Thank you Bob for your interesting post. I will try both the sites you suggest.
First time I read this blog (found with google – btw), but I bookmarked it.
Greetings from Italy.
Ciao
August 24th, 2012 at 7:23 pm
Hi Andrew: Thanx for the comment. It reminded me to check out the Seeks Project again…
Greetings from Canada!
–Bob.