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Comment by glaberficken | Hacker News Reader

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glaberficken

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.

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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.

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