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Comment by varbhat | Hacker News Reader

How many bangs do you really remember ?

Bangs are cool but i don't think one can remember many bangs.

This site is also very good. But, it's unfortunately not much use to me as i would directly search the term with 'site:' during the time i would take to search for specific bang.

Also, if i wanted to search specific site, i would add it in search engines of my browser.

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For many sites, you can probably just guess the bang without much hassle. The easiest example is IMDb, but my success rate guessing is pretty high.

Plus, most people tend to spend most of their time on just a few sites. Knowing one or two bangs is useful enough.

I don't use this, but looking at that list, I would disagree. I just looked up some of the top sites I'd want to use and I wouldn't have guessed any of them

Wikipedia -> !w

Youtube -> !you

reddit user -> !reu

subreddit -> !reddits

also !reddit points to new version, I'd want !redditold

Twitter -> !tweet

Steam -> !steme (???)

Twitch -> !ttv

That being said, if you're on DDG, there's pretty good auto complete on bangs so you can find it by typing the name and looking at the favicons.

There are multiple aliases. For instance, I use !yt for YouTube (just checked and !youtube also works), and !twitch for Twitch. I'll agree with the parent in that it's very rare that I'm unable to guess the bang that I want.

Yup, throwing my hat into this ring of agreement. I used to have tons of special search engines in Chrome to do this, often aliased as name or something, and I switched to DDG and started using their Bang's just to realize that most of my custom search engines were obsolete and like 2-3 needed to be retrained in my head.

In many of these the full name is also a valid bang. For example: !wikipedia !youtube !twitter !steam !twitch.

As others mentioned, many sites have multiple bangs. Twitter for example, my guess would be "!tw" and it is correct.

Also, if you want to know one of the bangs, "!bang twitter" lists all if the ones involving Twitter.

> also !reddit points to new version, I'd want !redditold

old.reddit.com !oldred

old reddit !ored

Subreddit (Old Style) !ors

Old Reddit (subreddit) !osr

I use !yt for YouTube.

Also you can use !wfr, !wit, !wde for the French, Italian or German version of Wikipedia.

The same goes for Amazon: !a, !afr, !ade, and so on...

author here, i find myself using more specialized search engines like github search (the best code search engine right now https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/searc... ); so specialized search engines might be the place to go when the big guys fail to find something. So it's not always the same as searching with site: ...

!rt, !imdb, !w, !wde, !g, !gde, !ddgde, !cache, !webarchive

Those are probably my most commonly used ones.

I do remember some 4 of them. Those are the ones that I use reasonable frequently. A page like this is nice because you can look in that and see some new operator that would be very useful, but you didn't know of it.

I use those operators instead of setting a new search provider because switching providers is a mouse action, while adding the operator is just some few more key presses.

off the top of my head (these are ones that I use at least somewhat regularly):

- !a (amazon)

- !gm (google maps)

- !i (ddg images, could also use !gi for google images)

- !news (ddg news)

- !w (wikipedia)

- !mcmaster (mcmaster-carr)

- !r (reddit)

- !hn (hackernews)

- !tw (twitter)

- !economist (economist)

- !gh (github)

Also I find that sometimes I just guess and get it right (thats how i ended up realizing !mcmaster was a thing)

I love the !sr bang. For example, "!sr apple" takes me to Reddit's Apple subreddit.

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