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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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