Take one of the xml for DuckDuckGo in the OpenSearch standard, here’s mine:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>DuckDuckGo</ShortName>
<Description>Encrypted Duck Duck Go with encrypted Google Suggest</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">https://duckduckgo.com/favicon.ico</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="https://duckduckgo.com/?q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" template="https://encrypted.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url rel="suggestions" type="application/x-suggestions+xml" template="https://encrypted.google.com/complete/search?q={searchTerms}&client=ie8&mw={ie:maxWidth}&sh={ie:sectionHeight}&rh={ie:rowHeight}&inputencoding={inputEncoding}&outputencoding={outputEncoding}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>
and save as /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers/duckduckgo.xml for instance on Debian Wheezy. Now, refresh Gnome Shell (by doing alt+f2, ‘r’) and whenever you search for someting in the Shell’s Activity overview, you have the possibility to search the Web with DuckDuckGo.
Hi Hugo,
just wondering why one would want to have duck-duck-go as your search engine, as it uses Bing as its backend (or so I heard)?
I don’t see how Bing and Free Software could work well together – am I missing something?
Hi cybervegan,
Yes, you are right, DuckDuckGo uses several other crawlers (bing, blekko, yahoo, etc.)
However it does not impact your own personal searches, and most of duckduckgo’s sources are published as Free Software.
You can read http://donttrack.us/ for some more info.
BTW, there’s also YaCy which is very different from duckduckgo because it’s distributed, not centralised: https://fsfe.org/news/2011/news-20111128-01.html