Linux Mint signed a new partnership with DuckDuckGo.

The search engine features some revolutionary ideas and is now the default search engine in Linux Mint 12.

Here’s a quick introduction to DuckDuckGo, its philosophy and its features.

No tracking

Unlike all major search engines, DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. There is no search history, personal profile or any other information about you gathered, stored, sold, used or leaked.

For more information on this, you can read their privacy policy.

No bubbling

In other search engines, search results are personalized based on your Web history and personal profile. In other words, if two people search for exactly the same thing, they won’t necessarily see the same results. Based on the personal information the search engines have on them, different customized results will be shown.

DuckDuckGo does not gather such personal information and does not customize search results. So if two people search for the same thing, they’ll get the same results.

For more information on this, you can read this illustrated guide.

Features

DuckDuckGo is full of features.. and it’s hard to summarize them all. So let’s have a look at a few of them.

DuckDuckGo comes with something called the !bang syntax. Using that syntax you can quickly search using other search engines…

For instance, here are a few search queries and their respective results:

Query	Results
toy story	DuckDuckGo results for “toy story”
!youtube toy story	Youtube video results for “toy story”
!yt toy story	Youtube video results for “toy story”
!g toy story	Google results for “toy story”
!gi toy story	Google image results for “toy story”
!bi toy story	Bing image results for “toy story”

As you can see, you can use the !bang syntax to issue queries on Youtube, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and many other search engines. Of course when you’re using these other search engines, your personal information is tracked and your results are bubbled. Nonetheless it’s extremely convenient to have access to everything out there from a single search plugin.

There are hundreds of engines and query types you can use with the !bang syntax. For more information on this, please read the !bang features.

DuckDuckGo also features Zero-Click info sources, keyboard shortcuts, locations, calculations, conversions..etc. For a complete overview, please have a look at the DuckDuckGo features.

Open Source

DuckDuckGo is built on Open Source. Its backend is primarily in Perl and served via nginx. It uses a number of other open source components as well, such as PostgreSQL, Solr, and memcached.

Much of DuckDuckGo source is closed, but a growing portion is open. DuckDuckGo’s community platform (not yet launched) will be completely open. And DuckDuckGo has opened interfaces to enable Open Source developers to contribute goodies, API integrations and data stores to improve the search engine for everyone on particular subsets of queries.

DuckDuckGo has pledged to give back to the Open Source community. In 2010, the search engine sent donations to nginx, FreeBSD, Tor, Clamwin, Taho-LAFS and OpenSSH. With input from the DuckDuckGo community, DuckDuckGo will contribute new donations for 2011.

DuckDuckGo signed a partnership with Linux Mint to share the revenue generated by the “sponsored links” within the search results seen by Linux Mint users. By using the DuckDuckGo search plugin, you help fund Linux Mint and DuckDuckGo.

Philosophy

It’s interesting for Linux Mint and DuckDuckGo to join forces and do something together. Both projects are extremely successful but relatively small in their respective markets. If you compare DuckDuckGo to Google and Linux Mint to Windows, you can see a lot of similarities. Both projects have a small market share but they’re growing rapidly, both projects are run by very small teams who are easy to contact and eager to get things done, innovation and pragmatism are high on both sides, and the list of similarities goes on.

In Linux Mint 12, DuckDuckGo is now the default search engine. Similar to Linux, it comes with a learning curve. You can use it easily, but you’ll need to go through a bit of reading to understand its power and how to make the most of it. Of course, if you’d rather use what you’re familiar with, we made it easy for you to switch away and add other search engines in Linux Mint.

As we announced it a few weeks ago, Linux Mint is entering the search market. Our product is free and our focus is dedicated on improving the Linux desktop. Almost all our competitors either charge for their product (Microsoft, Apple) or engage in commercial activities (almost all commercial Linux distributions). Our business model needs to fund Linux Mint and give us the ability to focus entirely on the desktop to guarantee we can continue to innovate and enjoy sharing our work for free. We’re community-driven, we’re financed by our community and by its activity on the web and its interaction with advertisers. The first search engine to share with us the income generated by Linux Mint users is DuckDuckGo, and as it happens, it’s one of the most interesting engines out there.

So in Linux Mint 12, you have all the information you need to understand how your activity on the web and your search queries can help fund the distribution. And of course, because it’s your computer and because the main thing is your user experience and enjoyment while using Linux Mint, you have the choice to what you want to do. Whether it’s using DuckDuckGo, or adding other search engines to Linux Mint, we made it all very clear and very easy.

Linux Mint 12

Many bugs were fixed in preparation for the final release:

• apturl is now fully functional
• adding PPA repositories was fixed
• MATE received a critical update to mate-session-manager (this bug prevented MATE to be started from the login screen for i386 users)
• mintMenu was ported to MATE
• packages now open with gdebi
• mgse-menu received keyboard navigation and multiple bug fixes
• mgse-windowlist was given a brand new look and now looks extremely similar to the Gnome 2 window list
• mgse-bottompanel now makes it possible to switch between workspaces using the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+Alt+Arrow keys
• Mint-Z now features silver-looking bottom panels, menu and window list which look similar to Mint 11, as well as a new theme called Mint-Z-Dark which features black components and looks like an improvement of the MGSE desktop from the RC release.
• The ability to open directories as root was added to Gnome 3

The feedback we got from the RC wasn’t as straight forward as it usually is. As expected, the introduction of Gnome 3 is dividing the Mint community. We were delighted to see that MGSE was well received and that it helped people migrating to Gnome 3. MGSE received a lot of noticeable improvements since and the final release of Linux Mint 12 will come with a Gnome 3 experience that is significantly better than in the RC release.

I personally understand the fact that some Gnome 2 users are extremely concerned. Whether it’s Gnome 3 or MATE, these technologies are recent and they’re not as mature as Gnome 2. It’s important to understand that they represent our future though, and that sticking to Gnome 2 would make the situation in terms of packages and runtime conflicts with both Gnome 3 and Ubuntu completely unmanageable. In other words, if we were to stick to Gnome 2.32, Linux Mint would no longer be compatible with Ubuntu and you would not be able to run Gnome 3 in Linux Mint. We were one of the last distributions to support Gnome 2, we’re amongst the very few to support MATE and we’re innovating on Gnome 3 to ease this transition and make people feel at home on this new desktop. With Linux Mint 12 we’re giving Mint users the option to try MATE and to migrate to Gnome 3/MGSE. Though it might be considered a step backwards, these two desktops will improve rapidly and this is a process which needs to be done at some stage. Previous releases of Linux Mint are still available to users who prefer Gnome 2 of course, and by the time they become obsolete, both MATE and Gnome 3/MGSE will have matured, MATE into an ever-closer incarnation of Gnome 2, and Gnome3/MGSE into a brand new implementation of the vision we have for the Linux Mint desktop.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

You probably know Raphaël Hertzog and Roland Mas already, but did you know they wrote this book?

Until now the book was only available in French, but the two developers recently gathered enough financial support from the Linux community to translate their book into English. The story isn’t over though. They’re trying to gather enough funds for the liberation of the book and to release it under a free license.

You can read a chapter of this book at:

http://ouaza.com/~rhertzog/chapter-apt-mint.pdf

If you’re interested in helping out please visit the following URL:

http://debian-handbook.info/go/ulule-linuxmint/

Note: The affiliate tags for Linux Mint in the above links are not commercial. All the money you send to help the book, with the exception of applicable margins from Paypal and Ulule, goes to the book.

Anecdotes

Early this week, we received this interesting picture… a chipset with some kind of Linux Mint logo on it.

And in Romania, the University 1 Decembrie 1918 recently installed Linux Mint on the 21 computers of its PC Lab.