The prior existence of Google Timer was news to me, but it inspired me to research whether any other search engines or tools support the same sort of timer functionality that Google killed off.

After a few tests, I found that both DuckDuckGo and Brave Search return interactive timers for certain “Timer” search queries (see DuckDuckGo Timer and Brave Search Timer). After making this discovery, I had an idea. Most people do not use DuckDuckGo or Brave Search as their default search engine. Moreover, some people who do may want a quick way to trigger the timer. What if we could create custom search engine short cuts for browsers to trigger the timer functionality?īelow, I will first explain how the timer feature works in DuckDuckGo and Brave Search. I will then demonstrate how to create custom search engine shortcuts for both DuckDuckGo and Brave Search that will allow you to have easy access to their timers regardless of whether you use either DuckDuckGo or Brave Search as a primary search engine. For those interested in how adding custom search engines works as a general matter, I encourage you to read my article about my creating one for a DuckDuckGo domain-specific search for Project Gutenberg. Update (9/1/22): Shortly after I published this article, Google revived its Search Timer widget.

Duckduckgo vs brave