Here’s How You Install and Run DuckDuckGo on Your Linux Terminal

Browse the internet on your Linux terminal with ease

In this article, we will look into a program named ddgr that enables Linux terminal searches on DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is a great substitute for Google searches since it places a strong emphasis on privacy.

In this case the searches will be conducted through a terminal window. You can easily do searches from the command line and open the outcomes in your browser if you choose to or start the searches using the command line and save the outcomes into a text file instead.

Linux provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for the majority of activities, but some people go for the terminal, which is very common on Linux, especially for experienced users.

Installing ddgr

What you need to accomplish this is a Linux distribution of your choice and an account with superuser privileges (sudo). For Debian-derived distributions (Ubuntu), use the following command:

 Sudo apt-get install build-essential unzip -y

You should know by now that the only difference between distributions might be the packet managers, at least when it comes to installing programs. For instance, on Fedora, instead of “sudo apt get,” we’d use “sudo dnf”. So, if you’re not using an Ubuntu based distribution you know what to change to make this work for you.

Download DDR’s source code using the following GitHub link: https://github.com/jarun/ddgr/archive/refs/tags/v2.1.zip.

On your terminal, the wget command followed by the link does the trick; you can also do it manually or inspect the link before you proceed. It’s a matter of choice.

Assuming you have downloaded the compressed file, now we need to extract it. You can do so by following the command: Unzip “file name” and hit enter. You can also accomplish this using your file manager, but since we’re playing with the terminal, this should do the trick.

Navigate to the recent created ddr directory and run sudo make install to install DuckDuckGo on your terminal.

sudo make install

Using DuckDuckGo on your Linux Terminal

For a simple search

Use the command ddr followed by your search keyword or query.

ddr Medium

Searching for specific websites

If you’re looking for specific forums online, then for this, you’ll run the -w to go with your search query, followed by the name of your website.

ddr -w medium.com bitcoin

This will bring up bitcoin-related posts from this website.

Last but not least, we’ll take a look at bangs, which, fortunately, DDR supports. Bangs are basically shortcuts for specific sites. !medium is a shortcut to Medium.com. To search for Sam Writes Security on your terminal, you can use the following command:

backslash(\) exclamation mark(!) Medium Sam Writes Security \!medium Sam Writes Security

You can obviously replace my name and look yourself up on Medium or anywhere else where you have a profile.

After doing so much on ddr to exit it, just type “q” and hit enter. Please note that using ddr on the terminal will only bring up the top ten results, unlike the unlimited number you can get on your browser.

Thanks in advance for reading. I hope you enjoyed installing and running ddr on your Linux machine using only the command line.

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