Setup DuckDuckGo with Safari Omnibar

While I disliked Google before it was popular, it’s hard for me to argue that Chrome is a damn good browser on the Mac.

Thankfully, the Safari Omnibar plug-in[1] brings the best feature of Chrome — the unified address box and search field to Mac OS X’s native browser.

The Omnibar includes Google, Google Image and Wikipedia search by default. Adding DuckDuckGo is simple, however:

1. Right-click in the Omnibar, and select “Edit Omnibar Search Providers…”
2. Add a new item. I assigned the trigger “d” to DuckDuck Go. In the URL field enter:
   http://duckduckgo.com/?q={searchTerms}
3. Click Done, after deciding what to set as the default.

It’s that easy to get away from Google’s search engine and their browser. Happy non-creepy searching.

Update 1: It appears I’m a little behind the times. As Marco Frissen pointed out on Twitter, not only is the OmniBar available as a regular Safari extension via Apple’s site, but it comes with a normal prefrence pane within Safari. Whoops. I’m still using the SIMBL plugin still, for now.