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.

With DuckDuckGo, you can just type in 'expand' in-front of a shortened link and it will expand it for you.

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.