Fun With DuckDuckGo: Tricks and Easter Eggs!
Tags: productivity, duckduckgo, google, privacy
Published: 2020-10-31 18:51:59

[DuckDuckGo] is a rising search engine which has a 2.42% (2021) share of the US mobile search market, increasing from a mere 0.01% back in 2013. It's even more popular than big players like [Yahoo](https://www.yahoo.com/)! It is my personal favourite search engine, and it's full of cool shortcuts and easter eggs. It's privacy-first has a squeaky clean reputation among the community when it comes to privacy, and it claims to not sell OR collect your data (like Google, Bing, and countless others). It is also open-source, and community driven!

Here is a combined collection of cool shortcuts, tips, tricks and easter eggs hidden inside of [DuckDuckGo].

# Shortcuts

A few awesome shortcuts to either try out something silly, or to make your life easier.

### DuckDuckGo Bangs

Just type in "!" in-front of a search to open up that website, listed are a few examples

 - !devto (opens Dev)
 - !mdn (opens MDN Web Docs)
 - !yt (opens YouTube)

...and so on, so forth. For a list of all all of these "bangs", check out [this link](https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=) to view the 13,565 (and counting) bangs that [DuckDuckGo].

### Social Media Users

Just type in "@" in-front of a user or organisation, and watch the [magic]

### Generate placeholder 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 [lower] case.

### Generate passwords

Type in "password 50" or any other 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 (which in all fairness should be), then you can generate a passphrases using "random passphrase" and possibly find something a bit easier to remember :D

### 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! [DuckDuckGo] uses [is.gd](https://is.gd) as it's link shortener. Just type in "shorten" in-front of your link :D

### Cheatsheets

Add in "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 (so for example, calendar 17 August 1345) and it will pull up a calendar from [there]

### Generate QR Codes

Add "qr" and then a link and watch it generate a [QR code]

### Find HTML codes

Typing in ["HTML chars"] will bring up HTML codes for special characters!

### Find colour codes

Type in ["color codes"]

### Find certain colours

You can search up a [colour code], and [DuckDuckGo] will tell you what the colour is/looks like.

(Thanks to the awesome people in the comments for pointing this one out :wink:)

### 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 in [DuckDuckGo] to get the [results].

# __Easter eggs__

Some cool little Easter Eggs in [DuckDuckGo]:

 - [Why should I use this?]
 - [Raccoon]
 - [Hamburger]
 - [Cuil]
 - [xkcd]
 - [Google]
 - [Motherboard] (look at the icon ;)

...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 comment below. I'll be replying to all of them :wink:

[DuckDuckGo]: https://duckduckgo.com
[here]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=
[magic]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%40duckduckgo&t=brave&ia=twitter
[cheatsheet]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+cheatsheet&t=brave&ia=cheatsheet
[results]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=is+dev.to+down%3F&t=brave&ia=answer
[QR code]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qr+https%3A%2F%2Fharshhhdev.github.io%2F&t=brave&ia=answer
[upper]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uppercase+harshdev&t=brave&ia=answer
[lower]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lowercase+HARSHDEV&t=brave&ia=answer
[there]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=calendar+26+july+2006&t=brave&ia=answer
["HTML chars"]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=html+chars&t=brave
["color codes"]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=color+codes&t=brave&ia=web
[encode]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=url+encode+https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F&t=brave&ia=answer
[Why should I use this?]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=why+should+i+use+this&t=brave&ia=answer 
[Raccoon]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=url+encode+https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F&t=brave&ia=answer
[Hamburger]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=url+encode+https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F&t=brave&ia=answer
[Cuil]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cuil&v=c&ia=web
[xkcd]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xkcd&v=c&ia=comics
[Google]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google&v=c&ia=web
[Motherboard]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=motherboard&t=brave&ia=web
[colour code]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%23FFB38F&t=h_&ia=answer