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Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

I fail to see the point of these "bangs" versus resolving them locally (e.g. using firefox keyword bookmarks -- http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.html). Specially if you are using DuckDuckGo which I guess it's for privacy reasons (rather than say quality of results), why would one proceed to send them many more queries than they ought to receive?

Just do these redirections locally and send them to the appropriate site directly, skipping yet another unnecessary and potentially-meddling middleman.

Most damning is !g where both DDG and G get to see your query , offering zero privacy benefit and double the risk.

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I share your opinion but the reason is convenience: bangs work without any configuration.

I know people who use ddg only for bangs. They do all their web search with Google by prefixing them with !g.

Big firefox user here, but I had never seen the keyword bookmarks thing before. Thanks! I'll try that because yeah I'd love to just have the direct request rather than a redirect.

EDIT: WOW it's right there in the search field when you right click it and choose 'add a keyword for this search' !!!! thanks.

Bangs work anywhere, also on browsers where you cannot use these keywords or on someone else’s computer.

Setting this up sounds like a tremendous waste of time while DDG has already setup all the bangs for me.

Using !g only DDG can identify you. G would see your query so if you included your SSN etc then they could identify that, but they don’t know your IP etc.

!g redirects to Google, so yes, they get to know these things.

Odd, I just tested it and your right. I tried it before and it had the ddg interface. I wonder if something changed or if I was using the wrong syntax.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

“Remember, though, because your search is actually taking place on that other site, you are subject to that site’s policies, including its data collection practices”

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