How to Turn off Site Icons in DuckDuckGo Search Results

DuckDuckGo is a search engine as good as any other and they offer to honor the user’s privacy as much as they possibly can. I have been using DuckDuckGo for sometime and I find it relatively faster and easier to use compared to some of its kinfolks. When you search DuckDuckGo for something, it displays the URLs of the sites along with the site icons which could be a good thing for some special type of searches and for some people, but this always bothers me to see all these different site icons in the search results. Some of the web sites with bright colored site icons appear to be highlighted among others and other sites without any icons or with some dull colored icons stay a little bit placed behind the others.

DuckDuckGo

Fortunately DuckDuckGo offers so much customization that you can easily switch off these site icons or favorite icons (favicons in short) as they are called. Here is how:

  1. Open your web browser and navigate it to https://duckduckgo.com/settings#.
  2. Switch to the Appearance tab on this settings page.
  3. Scroll down the settings page and at the bottom you will find the setting we are interested in. Click on the Off flip-button displayed next to Site Icons.DuckDuckGo
  4. These settings are saved only to your web browser locally. But if you want, then you can save these settings to cloud by choosing the option from right hand side on the settings page.

Turning off the site icons not only makes the search results look much more neater, but it can also save your internet bandwidth if you are using one of those slow 3G mobile data network connections. And if you have saved these settings in the cloud, then you can restore these settings in any other web browser in any computer at the click of a button.