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Comment by mrschwabe | Hacker News Reader

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mrschwabe·

"most site’s internal search engines suck, returning results that are somewhat hit or miss. "

If I want to find a movie, I type !imdb Avengers

If I want to find a recipe, I type !allrecipes pizza

If I want to play music right now I type !grooveshark AC-DC Thunderstruck

If you know where to look use bangs. If you think Google does a better job, there's a bang for that too type !g

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I think all of those !bang searches above work just as efficiently as is (minus the bang of course) for me in Google. I'm not switching to some new search engine anytime soon.

Bangs? is that like using "site" in Google?

Using Google:

If I want to find a movie, I type site:imdb.com Avengers

If I want to find a recipe, I type site:allrecipes.com pizza

If I want to play music right now I type site:grooveshark.com AC-DC Thunderstruck

googling "site:imdb.com ..." uses google's index, restricted to imdb.com; DDGing "!imdb ..." uses imdb's internal search.

I almost never bother with sites' internal searches, as google's "site:" feature almost invariably works better, so I wouldn't be inclined to use DDG's site-search bang-lines myself. YMMV, I guess it depends on how good the site in question's internal search functionality is.

Heh, I always use Google instead of most site's internal search engines. Have you ever tried using MSDN search before? Even with the advanced filter options, the results are awful, awful, awful compared to what Google pulls up.

See also the mind-bogglingly dreadful search provided by Amazon.

I dread to think how many human hours have been wasted because of sub-optimal Amazon searches.

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