Ditching Google AI? Here’s how to master DuckDuckGo’s no-AI search engine

1. Narrow down your searches

People generally use AI for search because it’s able to quickly present relevant information. It often means you’re not spending time scouring the results for useful websites but if you’ve turned off AI, there are still many tricks that enable you to sift out the irrelevant stuff.

Let’s say you need to look for an exact term. Just place that term in quotation marks. For example, “latest Phones news, comment, reviews and features.” The search engine will then only return results that match that phrase.

If you want to ensure the search results include or exclude particular words, there are hacks for that too.

For example, if you’re looking for a phone and want to ensure the results include Apple? Enter phone +Apple. Looking for a phone and don’t want the results to include Apple? Enter phone -Apple.

2. Search page titles and page URLs

Websites have page titles and URLs. The former is a HTML element that lets you know what a webpage is about. The second is a unique web address. Both will often include keywords and you can take advantage of this.

DuckDuckGo lets you search for keywords in page titles and URLs.

To search for a word in a page title, enter intitle: before the word. For example, intitle: iPhone

To search for a word in a page URL, enter inurl: before the word. For example, inurl: iPhone

You could try using some of the hacks from the first step here to narrow your search further.

3. Find information within websites

If you know a particular website will have the information you need, don’t get DuckDuckGo to scour the entire web in the hope it will quickly find those details for you.

Instead, to find information within a website, enter site: before the website name then enter a search term.

For example, if you’re looking for more amazing “how to” articles in TomsGuide, you can enter site:tomsguide.com how to.

You can also use a similar hack to exclude websites. If you didn’t want results from TomsGuide (hey, why not?), then you would enter -site:tomsguide.com followed by the search term.

You could try using some of the hacks from the first step here to narrow your search further.

4. Use a website’s own search engine

You can also direct DuckDuckGo to use a website’s own search engine. DuckDuckGo uses shortcuts called “bangs” which are initiated by typing an exclamation mark.

If you want to use eBay’s search engine, for example, you’d type !e into DuckDuckGo and then enter your search term. For Amazon, you’d enter !a, for GitHub you’d enter !gh and for Netflix you’d enter !nf. You’ll be taken straight to the results on each company’s page.

But how do you know which bang to use when there are thousands of them? Simply use DuckDuckGo’s Bang search engine. Look for the websites that you use most regularly and make a mental note of them, speeding up future searches.

5. Look for files

If you want to find websites that have documents about a particular subject matter, you can use DuckDuckGo to look for PDFs, html files, doc(x), xls(x) and ppt(x) files.

Just enter filetype: and the kind of file you need then enter a search term. For example: filetype: PDF Apple iPhone

You could try using some of the hacks from the first step here to narrow your search further.

6. Activate Safe Search

There are also a few ways to ensure you search results exclude adult content. One is to use the Safe Search drop-down menu located beneath the search bar. The second is to use safe.duckduckgo.com, but then you’re not using the No AI service.

The third is to enter !safeon at the end of a search. For example, model !safeon. You can use !safeoff if you wish as well.