56 25 May – 7 June 2022 • Issue 632
SECRET TIPS FOR PRIVATE SEARCH ENGINES
Should you search with You.com?
You.com (https://you.com) is another new
search engine that’s hoping to lure web
users away from Google. It’s still in beta
and its results aren’t yet good enough to
rival the six sites we’ve reviewed, but it’s
notable for the interesting way it works.
Rather than simply provide a list of web
pages that match your query, You.com
presents you with a colourful grid of
results from relevant sources. These let
you scroll horizontally as well as vertically
to explore your results. It currently uses
150 sites including YouTube, Reddit,Twitter, Tripadvisor, Wikipedia, CNN
and BBC News, and lets you add your
own favourite sources by clicking the
‘Add apps’ button.
You.com claims to be “free of
tracking and invasive ads’’, but
its privacy policy (www.snipca.
com/41949) states that it collects
some information about you, including
your IP address and usage data. This is
to help “improve and enhance our services”
and, more worryingly, for marketing
purposes. However, switching to You.com’sSearch specific sites using
DuckDuckGo’s ‘bangs’
One of DuckDuckGo’s best features is
called Bangs, which lets you search
specific sites without using its own
search engine. Bangs are essentially
shortcuts that you type before your
search queries, which consist of an
exclamation mark followed by a site’s
first letter or a keyword, for example
!auk to search Amazon.co.uk; !w for
Wikipedia (see screenshot below); !r for
Reddit, !iplayer for BBC iPlayer; and !yt
for YouTube. Note that the results open in
the corresponding website rather than
DuckDuckGo, which means they aren’t
anonymous and your data may be tracked
by third parties.
There are now more than 13,500
DuckDuckGo bangs – visit http://www.snipca.
com/41849 to browse the full selection.
Most of these bangs also work in Brave
Search: http://www.snipca.com/41886.Generate strong passwords
using DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo can keep you secure as
well as private by generating strongpasswords for your online accounts.
Simply type password 8 into the search
box, press Enter and the search engine
will create a password consisting of eight
characters and display it below the search
box (see screenshot above). Similarly,
typing password 16 will produce a
16-character option. To generate a
stronger password that includes special
characters, enter password 8 strong.
DuckDuckGo can also create passphrases- just type random passphrase for a
four-word example, such as ‘unloaded
buffer next greedy’.
Change DuckDuckGo’s theme
to make it easier to read
Although applying a different theme forDuckDuckGo won’t make it any more
private, it can make the site easier on
your eyes and more suited to your taste.
Click the menu button in the top-right
corner (^1 in our screenshot below left),
select Themes and choose between
Default, Basic, Contrast, Dark, Grey and
Terminal (it’s a more colourful dark
mode, as the screenshot shows).
Click the Appearance tab^2 to alter the
font used by the search engine, as well
as the text size, the page width, centre
alignment and background colour. You
can also customise the header to hide the
duck logo as you scroll search results, and
remove the favicons next to each one.
Click ‘Save and Exit’ to confirm your
design choices.Switch to the ‘onion’ version
of DuckDuckGo
Unsurprisingly, DuckDuckGo is the
default search engine in the privacy-
focused Tor Browser (www.snipca.
com/41876), but if you want to guarantee
that nobody can see what you’re
searching for, you should use its special
‘onion’ version. This applies end-to-end
encryption to your search queries in Tor,
so that nobody will even know that
you’re using a search engine. You can
either access this via its 23-characterPrivate mode, by clicking the menu button
in the top-right corner and choosing
‘Switch to Private’ (see screenshot), “limits
the data we store and share”.DuckDuckGo’s Bangs feature lets you use
shortcuts to search other sitesUse
DuckDuckGo’s
secret password
manager to
create secure
loginsCustomise DuckDuckGo’s theme to make it
easier on your eyes2
1