Searching on DuckDuckGo is pretty much as easy as it is on other search engines. A few interesting features that it has include "Instant Answers" to give you immediate background information on your search terms, or "bangs" that allow you to go right to a specific website from DuckDuckGo and look for your search terms there. We'll explain how to do it all below.
How to do a basic DuckDuckGo search
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Go to www.duckduckgo.com in your web browser.
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Click in the search box and begin typing in your search terms. As you do so, DuckDuckGo will suggest some words or phrases that are commonly searched for. You can click a suggestion to search for those terms, or click the magnifying glass (or press the "Enter" key on your keyboard) to search for exactly what you typed in. Or, click the "X" to clear your search terms and start over.
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If your search is about something relatively familiar, you can find "Instant Answers" in the About section at the top (there may be more than one entry, depending on what you searched for). These are summaries of information about what you're looking for from Wikipedia and other database websites.
You can also click the other buttons here to search for different kinds of results besides web pages (see our DuckDuckGo Image Search and DuckDuckGo Video Search tutorials for more information). You can also click the "Region" button here to prioritize search results from areas that are close to where you live.
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All results from DuckDuckGo are displayed on the same page, so you don't have to click back and forth between different pages of results to find what you're looking for. (If more results don't automatically display when you scroll down, click Load More at the bottom of the screen.)
Click the arrow at the top of the window to go back to the top of the screen. Or, if there are no more results to display, click one of the related searches at the bottom to search for something similar, but more specific.
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Click on a result's name or Internet link to go to it. Or, move your mouse cursor over a result and then click More Results to narrow your search results by only looking for your search terms within that particular website. (Click Show All Results at the top of the page to go back to your unfiltered results.)
How to search on DuckDuckGo with "bangs"
"Bangs" are a feature of DuckDuckGo that allow you to search for your search terms directly on another website — even another search engine — through DuckDuckGo. Basically, they consist of an exclamation point ("!") followed by a name or short-form of a website that you want to conduct a search on.
For example, if you want to search for content on YouTube right from DuckDuckGo, then click in the search box and type in the bang "!yt" as a search term, followed by whatever you're exactly looking for.
When you submit your search by clicking the magnifying glass or pressing the "Enter" key on your keyboard, you will be taken directly to YouTube and conduct your search from there. It's as if you were searching on YouTube the whole time! Neat, huh?
There are over 8500 "bangs" that you can use to search directly on specific websites through DuckDuckGo! To browse or search for a specific bang, click here.
Those are the basics for how to search on DuckDuckGo!
