Alfred 2 Workflow to Search DuckDuckGo by Way of Google Suggest

DuckDuckGo via Google Suggest

Here’s a quickie workflow for Alfred 2. David Ferguson, a nerd who works on Alfred, has been building some excellent extensions for the launcher/so-much-more app. His Google Suggest workflow caught my eye, only I don’t particularly like using Google for my Web searches anymore. Luckily it’s easy enough to modify workflows in Alfred 2.

Google’s suggestions are a great feature. I use them all the time in Safari1 even though I’ve set the default search engine for the location bar to DuckDuckGo. I like DuckDuckGo’s commitment to privacy and the simplicity of their bang (!) searches. If I want to search on Google, I just type my string and add “!g” to do so. But they don’t offer a suggestion feature. That’s where David’s workflow (and my modification) comes in. (Download it here.) See update below.

I set the shortcut in Alfred to “s” for “search.” Launch Alfred,2 type “s” and then the start of a search string. Google suggestions will come up, selecting any of them and hitting Enter will take me to DuckDuckGo results. Selecting a result and hitting tab will put the cursor after the selected phrase, allowing me to add whatever bang I please, like !imdb or !a for Amazon.

I’m happy I got an Alfred Power Pack, which unleashes the power of workflows. I’m excited to see what else this little app can do.

Updated May 8, 2014: Changed plugin to support the new (and if you ask me, superior) DuckDuckGo Next. More info here.

Download Google Auto Complete to DDG.zip

Download Google Auto Complete to DDG Next.zip


  1. I really couldn’t tell you if that’s stock behavior or a plugin I installed. ↩︎

  2. ^+Space for me. ↩︎