DuckDuckGo Lite: efficient lightweight search

[harlan4096]

DuckDuckGo Lite is a tiny resource-friendly search option by the search engine DuckDuckGo that is as fast as it can get.

Users of DuckDuckGo use the search engine for its stance on privacy but also functionality that it provides. The main DuckDuckGo site works well on desktop and mobile systems. The search engine's homepage and search results pages display elements besides the search field and results: there are ads, images or news may be displayed, and menus and other information may also be displayed.

The search results are not as polluted with advertisement as Google's results are and tracking is not used by DuckDuckGo when it comes to advertisement.

DuckDuckGo users who, sometimes or all the time, want a quicker way of accessing the search engine may find DuckDuckGo Lite useful for that purpose. The tiny homepage of DuckDuckGo Lite displays only a search field, and the equally tiny result pages list only the results (and a search field).

Overall size of the page is reduced significantly. The entire homepage has a size of less than 5 Kilobytes compared to the 1 Megabyte size of the original landing page. The search results page is equally tiny, it has a size of about 33 Kilobytes compared to the roughly 2 Megabytes of the original search results page.

DuckDuckGo makes less than a handful of requests when you load the homepage or search results. The original DuckDuckgo search results page makes more requests, over 50 at times).

As a comparison: the Google Search homepage has a size of about 1.9 Megabytes, result pages differ based on ads and other content but they are usually in the 2-3 Megabyte range (with content being dynamically loaded at times). Google makes way over 100 requests on its search results pages.

Closing Words

The lite version that DuckDuckGo maintains is ideal for low-resource or slow/unreliable Internet situations. Considering that you just need to transfer 10 Kilobytes and make two or three requests to display the search page and just a bit more for results, it is ultra-light and fast at the same time.

Obviously, it may also be used if resources are not an issue as results are displayed quickly and without any noise but at the expense of some of the additional functionality that DuckDuckgo provides on its main search site.

Now You: which search engine do you prefer currently and why?
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