Fun DuckDuckGo tricks
October 31, 2020
DuckDuckGo: it's my personal favorite search engine, and has grown to more and more popularity over the past few years. It has a squeaky clean reputation when it comes to privacy, as it claims to not sell your data. Alongside it's open-source and community driven.
Here are a list of some easter eggs, fun, and silly DuckDuckGo tricks/tips.
Tips/tricks
A few awesome tips and tricks to either try out something silly, or to make your life easier.
Bangs
Just type in 't' infront of a search term to open up that website.
- !devto
- !mdn
- !yt
...and so on, so forth. For a list of all all of these 'bangs', check out duckduckgo.com/bang.
Social Media
Just type in '@'' infront of a user or organization, and watch the magic.
Generate lorem ipsum 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 lowercase.
Generate passwords
Type in 'password [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, you can generate a passphrases by searching 'random passphrase'.
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. Just type in 'shorten' infront of your link.
Cheatsheets
Adding '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 (eg. 17 August 1345) and it will pull up a calendar from then.
Generate QR Codes
Add 'qr' and then a link will generate a QR code.
Find HTML codes
Typing in 'HTML chars' will bring up HTML codes for special characters.
Find color codes
Type in 'color codes'.
Find certain colors
You can search up a color code, and it'll show you what color is/looks like.
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 to get the results.
Easter eggs
Some cool little Easter Eggs hiding inside here.
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 write a comment. I'll be replying to all of them.