Yep, that's the one Sixwheeledbeast.

Go to duckduckgo.com on your N900 (you'll need to use "Hide Useragent" or you may get a weird looking mess or thrown to a mobile page)

Once on dickduckgo there will be a small box hovering over the search field saying "Add to browser". Click "More ways to add DDG" and follow the guide titled "Manually setting DuckDuckGo as the default search for your Firefox address bar:"

If you get it right you should go to DDG whenever you type a search query into the address bar.

DDG Help acticle for Firefox.




Also it's worth noting you can setup all your setting and preferences and save them in the URL bar.
This way if the cookies are destroyed you don't have to keep going to settings.

I use the following URL

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=&kl=uk-en&...=s&k4=-1&k1=-1

This is UK searches, https if possible, safe search off, non floating search bar, orange colour, no sideboxes, super-wide, large font, etc, etc.

To-do this go to duckduckgo.com/settings
Setup your settings then select "Bookmarklet and settings data" your custom URL will be there.

The other great thing with DDG is the bangs.

If you set your default search engine as DDG you can type short commands in the URL bar and jump straight there.
They all start with a "!" (bang)

!yt - youtube
!w - wikipedia
!e - ebay.com

To see them all check out
http://duckduckgo.com/bang

I've just changed my search provider to DDG using the about:config method.

It works fine except:
1. I had to killall browser to make the change apply;
2. The search pop-up still says Google search even though it uses DDG.

How do I fix #2?

Another cool private search engine is startpage, it has a cool 'view by proxy' feature so even the links you visit can't pick up your IP address.

At the risk of being accused of thread necromancy, I'll give you an answer to #2

Contrary to what one might expect, the "Google Search:" string is not related to any of microb's configurations data and it is not easily configurable. Instead, it is an hardcoded string inside the browser itself; what makes the situation worst is that the browser strings are available for each supported locale, meaning that for each locale that you care about you would have to make an adjustment.

In short, the things needed to change the string to whatever you wish are:
1) write down the locale you are using
2) open a root shell to the N900 (ssh recommended)
3) navigate to /usr/share/locale/<your locale here>/LC_MESSAGES
4) make a backup copy of osso-browser-ui.mo
5) hexedit osso-browser-ui.mo making sure that the file format's structure is respected

The file format in question is the 'Machine Object' file format, which is thankfully very simple. The specification is available here.

Result in action here.

"Google Search:" is 14 characters, same as "DuckDuckGoing:". That's the way I preserve structure of such strange files: I edit only "normal" text, not strange symbols, and I preserve length of normal text as it was. Thank you for file-format-name and link to specification. :-)

About the icon to the left of the words: it is inside icon theme.
/usr/share/icons/<theme>/48x48/browser_search.png

I put DuckDuckGo icon here, too ;-)

Thank you! Best wishes.
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Per aspera ad astra...