Signs of Triviality

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DuckDuckGo Onion Search for Firefox

July 30th, 2021

DuckDuckGo offers a Tor .onion V3 search URL over here:
https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/.

In order to add this to Firefox as an OpenSearch engine to let you default to using the DuckDuckGo Tor search, you need to jump through a few hoops, though. I must have done so a while back for the V2 URL, and since I can't find an up to date search plugin, let me use my blog as a memory bank for the next time I want to update the URL of a custom search:

First, create a .xml file like this:

<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
                       xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
  <ShortName>DDG Tor</ShortName>
  <Description>Duckduckgo Tor</Description>
  <InputEncoding>[UTF-8]</InputEncoding>
  <Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">https://duckduckgo.com/favicon.ico</Image>
  <Url type="text/html"
    template="https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/">
    <Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
  </Url>
  <moz:SearchForm>https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/</moz:SearchForm>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Stash that XML file somewhere convenient, like here.

Create a .html file that contains in the HEAD the link rel="search" meta tag pointing to that URL:

<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml"
    title="DuckDuckGo Tor" href="https://www.netmeister.org/misc/ddg.xml">

Now you can click on the search bar at the location of this HTML file and then click the search icon with the little green plus sign:

Screenshot showing how to add the search option
from the browser's search bar

After this, you can then select "DuckDuckGo Tor" as the default search engine in Firefox under about:preferences#search:

Screenshot showing how to select DuckDuckGo Tor
as the default search option in Firefox's preferences

After that, any new search in the address bar will use the shiny new DuckDuckGo V3 Onion search - yay!

Screenshot showing the new default DuckDuckGo Tor
search in action

And just so you don't have to jump through all these hoops, you can simply add this Onion search as described above right here from this blog post. Enjoy!

July 30th, 2021