DuckDuckGo's bang | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo's bang

duckduckgo.com

107 pointstmlee74 comments

I much prefer that the browser fulfills this role instead of the search engine.

Like in chrome you can start typing "yt" [Tab] and search youtube

Or in Firefox you can setup keywords and do "yt" [space] and search.

The advantages I see of using DDG's bang are:

1. You don't personally have to maintain the list of keyword searches, so if Amazon changes how their search bar works, DDG takes care of changing the query string for you.

2. DDG auto-suggests keywords when you type the bang, so you don't necessarily have to remember some keyword you haven't used in months.

The main disadvantage is that more of your searches go through a third party if you use the bang, rather than going directly to the site you are trying to search.

All that said, I prefer the browser, too, because I can customize it to my needs (filling in defaults to other variables) and name the keywords things that I'll be more likely to remember or find easier to type.

For keyword searches I haven't set up that DDG possesses, I can always use "ddg !keyword term" to get the same functionality or "ddg +site:subdom.dom.com term" for similar, but different functionality.

Unfortunately, I've seen DDG !bang search shortcuts broken for days or weeks. I've reported them to DDG's bug-reporting black hole and on their subreddit with no feedback.

I would expect DuckDuckGo's servers to send "health check" queries to every !bang shortcut daily or even hourly. Detecting broken URL queries might be difficult because websites frequently redesign their pages, but an automated health check could at least detect serious problems like HTTP errors or offline servers.

Same here, I use this for lots of things (Wikipedia in three languages, youtube, bing/google images, etc.). All I need to type is 1-3 characters and a space. By comparison, I find the exclamation mark extremely annoying to reach for simple queries because it takes my whole left hand basically out of reach of any other key, but then again, I also find the arrow keys relatively hard to reach and prefer Vim, so it's probably personal. For another datapoint, my brother doesn't mind the bang syntax.

I've recently switched from Vivaldi back to Firefox, and I'm unfortunately finding this somewhat lacking. In Vivaldi you are able to set the URL for any custom search you wish (for example, a Google search would be setup via https://www.google.com/search?q=%s), however in Firefox this seems to rely entirely on whether or not there exists a plug-in to provide this function. Just yesterday I wanted to setup a Wolfram Alpha search in this manner, only to find out that it wasn't possible due to the Wolfram search bar plug-in being out of date. For many search shortcuts like this I've been forced to rely on DDG's bangs.

Firefox lets you set up search shortcuts for any keyword, but the feature isn't very discoverable. (I just found out about it last week.) You right-click on the search field and select "Add a keyword for this search". Then when you do a search you just put your keyword before the search term, like "yt cat vs cucumber" to search YouTube.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

This can also be done manually by going through the bookmark menu (Ctrl+Shift+B) and adding a keyword. Using this keyword then replaces the phrase "%s" in the URL with the search string.

You can e.g. create a bookmark to 'https://whereisscihub.now.sh/go/%s' with the keyword 'sci' to search for articles or urls on scihub.

You can do this with Firefox for most searches. Just right click -> add keyword for this search.

Why did you switch back, may I ask?

Right-click the input field on the Wolfram Alpha site.

I agree, but primarily because I'm in the UK. It's great that DDG has !a for amazon, but it goes to .com which is pointless for me and probably all other non-US DDG users.

However, I like that DDG supports it as well, as it's very useful on mobile browsers like Firefox Focus that don't offer this support.

try !aca or !auk.

It's useful if you've already started a search and want to switch to another search engine for different results. You can append it to the end of the search

And in fact put it anywhere within the search query!

I prefer bangs over browser shortcuts, personally. I can expect it to work the same in every browser, so I get consistency over all my devices.

I use DDG as my primary search engine, so I prefer the bangs as it fits my flow.

I search in DDG and if I come up with nothing I go to the search form and add an appropriate bang to the front of my keywords and voilà, no need to re-type my query.

Chrome can also setup keywords, it's just not as easy as it used to be / as easy as right clicking any search field in Firefox.

I also setup keywords for easier navigation of sites with short and consistent URL schemes.

Eh, Chrome's auto-keyword system works well in most cases, and the ones that don't it's very easy to right click on the address bar and click "Edit Search Engines" to clean up the list and create any search URL you want.

You have to conduct a search then go edit the keyword - in Firefox you can right click a search bar if you wish to add it. Mucking around in the settings is less convenient - and since it uses the domain of the site as the keyword - I find it is always necessary to change the keyword.

I use both browsers pretty extensively - Chromium at work and Firefox at home. Some internal tools don't work with Firefox very well, since they're only tested on Chrome.

Just make Duck Duck Go your default search engine and BANG! role effectively fulfilled by browser.

I have "wbm" as the shortcut in firefox for the way back machine.

I find bangs lacking from a UX perspective. It's not that I struggle to use them, like most of you I'm used to the terminal and text-based interfaces, but it just seems like a bad form of feature discovery for non-technically literate people.

It would be nice if this sort of domain filtering could be done with the UI instead of relying on the bang itself (by all means leave it in for power users). You could just check a checkbox and a separate text box would appear for typing in the domain you want to filter on.

I like bangs because they can be used from the address bar of any browser. That couldn't be done with checkboxes.

Bang syntax is super convenient for mobile browsers as well, in a way that nothing short of in-browser integration can replace.

For example, AFAIK Safari for iOS can’t use custom search keywords, but you can set up DDG as the search engine and make accessing a lot of websites (e.g. Wikipedia, Google Translate, Wordreference, Google, Pubmed) a lot faster.

It's a good point. But I don't suggest removing them as I mentioned they are great for power users. I just think the functionality could be extended to users who are not used to text based interfaces like we are.

Like the Firefox search bar? https://media.askvg.com/articles/images5/Mozilla_Firefox_New...

Do you mean like a list of checkboxes? Pressing "!" in the DDG search bar already brings up a list of bang codes for suggested sites with icons that you can click on, I think that's enough even for light users.

No, just one checkbox for "filter by domain" or however you would phrase it, and second text input for typing wikipedia or whatever would appear. I know this seems like a trivial difference because for us it is, but it means that the functionality is completely discoverable from the UI instead of having to remember how the hidden functionality works. It makes a big difference to less technically literate users.

It's not quite "filter by domain", though. It simply redirects your search to a particular thing.

Google's term for it is "search <website>"

I am a long time DDG user, going on 4 years? I am just now starting to revert back to google more and more as I start to find their results lacking. The main problem I have with bangs is that my mental mode for searching is always going directly to the search string first. The friction of having to back out of that and insert a bang is too much. I would love to be able to add the bang at the end, as it is often then that I realize a particular search string would be better suited for google or some other service (but mostly google). I'll send them that suggestion.

I've been adding the bang at the end of the string for years, and you can even add it in the middle:

    hacker news !g
    hacker news!g
    hacker !g news
    hacker!g news

all work.

I must be too dumb to use this feature, because everything I enter, including the examples from the page, gives me "No Results Found". (Seems like it works from the main page, though.)

The page linked here is a searchable list of what bangs exist, like !hn for hackernews.

Awesome, stellar tip.

You already can add the bang at the end. That is what I do usually. I am also finding the exact opposite, I have been getting much better results on DDG than Google lately. DDG is a search engine where as Google is a marketing platform.

This is all anecdotal, but something like 90% of my searches are fine in DDG. The rest are for highly specific searches in narrow fields where there just aren't many results at all, or where there's lots of results in another language e.g. Japanese. Google is better at filtering those out.

Ecosia[0] does this by using a hash sign at the end of the string instead, like "query #g" to google "query". I prefer that to DDG's bangs, but ecosia only has a couple of available options[1].

e: Apparently DDG can do this after all, so ecosia is actually less flexible since the search tag has to come at the end!

[0] ecosia.org

[1] https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657321-What-...

You can add bangs at the end afaik: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search%20!g

> I would love to be able to add the bang at the end

I've always been using it that way, and it works fine. Did you have a problem with using it at the end?

Good news. You can already put the band on the end.

I just went to DDG, and searched "cats !gi" and it did a google image search.

As for results - I find DDG has good results for most things. Sometimes it's better than google. Occasionally worse. So it's helpful to have the bang when i need it.

Actually, a bang can be inserted anywhere in your query if I understand properly your problem.

ex: "duckduck!g search" works as expected and go to google!

It is the same as site:domain.name in google and most other search engines. You can add that at the end or beginning of the search string.

you can also do:

!site <domain> <search string>

ex:

!site news.ycombinator.com duckduckgo

equates to:

site:news.ycombinator.com duckduckgo

Wow, that is so true! I never thought of it like that but it can be a bother when you realize the search is going to need google behind it.

I believe you can and have always been able to insert the bang anywhere in the query, as long as it has spaces between it and any words.

I’ve been using DDG for about a year and find it works great. I never end up using google.

Are there particular types of searches you have trouble with?

I just tested it, and bangs can be entered at the end of the search string.

"foo bar !g" searches Google for "foo bar"

"I would love to be able to add the bang at the end" That ability is already there. I use it all the time.

But you already can insert a bang at the end of the search string

You can do this e.g. 'search string !w'

you can already query with a bang at the end of the search string.

<something you want to search> !g

The problem with ! is that it's a shifted character, so it's not a good choice for something which you use many times a day. An unshifted character would be better. E.g. comma: ,w for wikipedia

It would be more efficient. If it was vim or emacs, you could rebind. I think it should be easy enough for ddg to make the special character customizable as set by a cookie.

From the perspective of someone who uses bangs daily, it doesn't doesn't make a difference in terms of UX

, is a marketing fail over ! though. (apologies to Yahoo)

Privacy is cool and all but this is the main reason I use DDG. I use the ! constantly. It makes search so much faster and enjoyable. I can go straight to what I want.

Hard agree, I just feel faster using DDG. Every once in a while I need to throw a !g to find what I want and that isn't a huge deal breaker for me. For 90% of searches it works great.

Do you guys program? Google is like a brain extension, I'm worried DDG wouldn't give me the same results, and it would hurt my work flow.

You got !g for google, !gi for images, !gm for maps, !gt for translate, !gn for news, !gv or !yt for video, heck even !gf for flights. It helps you go straight to what you want.

I switched back to google after more than a year using duckduckgo, the results were just not as good as Google.

However I'm still using the !bangs which are just an awesome feature, I higly recommend using http://www.duckduckgoog.com/ which provides bangs on top of google search.

I recently switched to DDG and while the results sometimes aren't as good as Google, the feeling of not worrying what my searches will do to my filter bubble is priceless. I realize I'm still tracked and profiled in a million other ways, but any improvement is welcome. The bangs are a nice touch, but much less important to me.

This idea was tried 15 yrs ago or so.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040612211249/http://www.osx.co...

This is a great presentation of the feature and a good directory to learn more about the bangs available. I use them all the time, usually regarding programming topics (language reference, GitHub, etc.), but now I see there are many more I could start using. !astock for Adobe Stock is just one example. Great feature! (I have DDG as my default in Safari so searching and using bangs is a breeze.)

I find myself using !g, !a, !w, and !mw the most. I like that I can go directly to these services instead of a search page.

Such a fantastic feature. I can even search through Unity's docs, right from my search bar. Sure, DDG can be a little behind with search, but the bang feature more than makes up for it IMHO. I probably use DDG for ~80% of searches and it gets the job done. It is a small price to pay for peace of mind. Keep up the good work!

Interesting but probably not very useful.

Major public websites invest heavily in SEO. So practically speaking, what the user actually wants can often be better surfaced with Google (which draws upon a great number of signals) than with on-site search (which could merely be backed by elasticsearch or by a relatively simple homegrown system).

I use DDG kind of in the same way that I use multiple web browsers, where I prefer everything locked down in Firefox but occasionally sites won’t work very well unless I switch to Safari without add-ons running. Sometimes you just need Google results.

Also, DDG+g! is a great way to get de-AMPed Google results on mobile.

Several years ago I built https://shortmarks.com as a way to use search shortcuts from any browser. The code isn't pretty and I haven't updated it in eons, but it works well enough.

Here's my collection of favorite DDG bangs: http://duckgobang.com. It's my way of getting people off the Google habit and to try bangs instead.

It took me some conscious effort, but I finally managed to train myself to make DuckDuckGo my default search engine.

I was vaguely aware of bangs, but I had not known how many other search engines it can tap into, this is really cool.

A discussion from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772034

Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines, click to add a custom search engine and add search engines with short keywords. For example you can add "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s" with the keyword "y", then if you type "y whatever" in the omnibar it will search "whatever" on youtube. The big draw back is that you won't get search suggestions when using a keyword.

Here are my most used custom search engines:

w https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s search wikipedia using wikipedia's search engine

ww https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%s&btn... search wikipedia through google and open the first result

h https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%... results only from hacker news

r https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s only search results from reddit

y https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s youtube

b http://93.174.95.27/search.php?req=%s search for books on libgen

m https://www.google.ca/maps/search/%s google maps

wo https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s wolfram alpha

ima https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s google image search (I tried using "i" and "im", but those are often part of my query)

s https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s search stack overflow through google

st https://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s search all stack exchange sites through their search engine

defaults vs tedious setup

Reply on news.ycombinator.com