Using Duck Duck Go’s “feeling lucky” as a Fallback Search

[Floating.Point]

I posted this in response to a Reddit thread and thought it might be helpful to some people here. 

One of my most used features is using Duck Duck Go’s !Ducky bang as one of Alfred’s Fallback Searches.

 

Sorry what? You may ask…

Well firstly what is a fallback search?

“Fallback searches are the list of search options you see when you search for a keyword that doesn't match a result on your local Mac.”
From Alfred’s [documentation](https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/default-results/fallback-searches/)

So if I type “Apple MacBook Pro” into Alfred, I’m not gonna get many hits from my local Alfred search. But what I will see are my Fallback options. Choosing one will take whatever text I’ve typed into Alfred and do *something* with it.

In this case that *something* is pretty handy thanks to the !Ducky bang.

 

The !Ducky bang is a way of using Duck Duck Go similar to Googles “I’m feeling lucky” feature. Basically it’s a specially formulated URL that will take you directly to the top search result, completely bypassing the search engine page. So if I enter the url 
`https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!ducky+MacBookPro` into my browser, Duck Duck Go will take me directly to the MacBook Pro page on Apple’s website. 

 

So to bring this all together and explain what’s really magical about this:

 

By using this special URL as one of Alfred’s Fallback Searches, means that whenever I want to go to a site, I just invoke Alfred and spam a few words I know would result in that page being the first search result. Alfred will open the special url in my browser and Duck Duck Go will instantly take me to the page I’m after. That’s it! It’s super handy!

To set this up, just make a new fallback search using the following URL 
`https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!ducky+{query}`

 

If you need help with setting up fallback searches, see the documentation linked earlier.

 

I think Alfred still ships with Googles I’m Feeling Lucky as a default Fallback. Unfortunately Google no longer takes you directly to your result, instead presenting a redirect page that requires manually clicking to proceed (annoying). You can circumvent this using a user script via something like tampermonkey. But the Duck Duck Go service doesn’t require this.

Edited July 7 by Floating.Point