Disclaimer: This morning I received an email from Stickermule offering a free set of DuckDuckGo stickers to the first 100 people who wrote about the Stickermule/DuckDuckGo store. I'm a sucker for free stickers (don't like to have a naked Macbook), so here it is...
So I'm a customer of Stickermule. They did some sweet CURE stickers for us recently (which I'm proudly sporting on the back of my iPhone & Macbook). And I got this interesting email this morning from them (see above) about the DuckDuckGo store they have developed.
I've never heard of DuckDuckGo, but being the curious chap that I am, I checked it out. Turns out DuckDuckGo is an up and coming contender in the world of web search engines (for those who don't habla la web, think "Google competitor"...if such a thing can exist??!).
DuckDuckGo's niche is for people who want to reject the Google giant - in particular the well known tracking habbits of the world's number one search engine. They also claim to have less "spam and clutter" and other cool goodies. They've even recieved some attention from the bigwigs like Lifehacker, Time, Wired, Fast Company, and others.
In a nutshell, DuckDuckGo seems to cater to people who want their search experience to be less about the search experience, and more about the search result - i.e. final destination.
But one of the most interesting features that is not mentioned clearly on their About page (I discovered it from the Lifehacker article) is their support for keyboard shortcuts. They claim to be a "Zero-click" search experience, which may very much appeal to programmers and other hard core computer shortcut users (like myself).
I'm not sure if they're going to give Google a run for their money anytime soon, but DuckDuckGo seems to be a very compelling and viable search engine for it's core audience.