Use DuckDuckGo ‘Lite’ for Blazingly Fast Search Results
Most people probably think of DuckDuckGo as a more privacy- focused alternative to Google, but one of the less-discussed benefits of ditching all this data tracking is to improve search speed. DuckDuckGo’s regular search uses less data and requires fewer queries than Google, but there is also a ” lightweight ” version of the DuckDuckGo page that loads results much faster.
The main DuckDuckGo home page and Google search pages are about 2MB in size. That’s not much by today’s standards, but DuckDuckGo Lite cuts that down to 33KB. The only UI elements on the screen are the search bar and the DuckDuckGo logo – all ads and other images have been removed. DuckDuckGo Lite also only needs to make a few queries to populate the search results page, while the regular DuckDuckGo page is at least 50 and Google is 100 or more. These smaller numbers result in almost instant load times; we’re talking about milliseconds, not seconds.
Here are some hard numbers to stop at. I searched for Lifehacker on all three engines in the same Chrome browser on the same PC, and here’s how long it took to load the search results:
DuckDuckGo: 2.40 seconds
Google: 7.56 seconds
DuckDuckGo Lite: 264 milliseconds
Should I always use DuckDuckGo Lite instead of other search pages? If internet speed and data limits are not an issue where you live, you will save only a few seconds at best, but users with slower or limited connections will benefit the most from DuckDuckGo Lite as it uses a lot less data. …