Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

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What do I need from a search engine? Not an LLM chatbot, not any of the auxiliary “smart” stuff. I want customizable results, and to be able to jump into searching quickly and intuitively.

(Decent results, sure, but that is subjective.)

So, a big reason I was using DDG over Google, despite often subpar results, was bangs. Now I pay for Kagi, and guess what convinced me to subscribe? Bangs indicate caring about power users. How cool would it be if I could set Kagi as default search in any browser and get powerful shortcuts at my fingertips across all devices?

Well, for some reason Kagi seems to expect the bang to be added at the end, separated by a space, with exclamation mark after (not before). If you don’t do it just right, you’ll just be on Kagi, losing 5+ seconds and your train of thought.

I’m sure I’m in a minority but I swear, if Kagi is not going to make bangs work properly soon, I’m not renewing. If you do emulate DDG, go all the way, otherwise it’s just taunting your users…

/rant

Kagi got me into using bangs, and now I'm developing a better, open-source implementation of bangs: https://bangtastic.vercel.app/

Right now it just falls back on Kagi to execute the bangs, but in the future:

- Bangs executed locally (when possible)

- Local "custom bangs" configuration (create new bangs, update existing bangs)

- Select fallback bang provider (queries with bangs: DDG, Kagi, Brave, etc)

- Select search engine separately (queries without bangs: Google, Kagi, DDG, Yandex, etc)

- Lots of other features, like executing multiple bangs at once.

Also note DuckDuckGoog supports DDB bangs with Google search: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/4260964

As another datapoint, bangs through Kagi have been working perfectly for me on every device in the way you would expect (set it as default, and use bang as normal).

> Well, for some reason Kagi seems to expect the bang to be added at the end, separated by a space, with exclamation mark after (not before). If you don’t do it just right, you’ll just be on Kagi, losing 5+ seconds and your train of thought.

What?.. bangs work both at the beginning and end of the query, and the exclamation mark has to be put before the bang.

The number of times I landed on Kagi after typing !hn something, then tried multiple times to get the bang right, then went to Algolia’s instance direct, is maybe a dozen by now.

However, I wonder if they [ninja-]fixed it, because it does work as of now. Kudos if so!

What? My !bangs work as a prefix to my query. I didn't even know you could append them and have that work.

it seems the parent user either wants to put the bang in the middle of the query or does not want to put a space in.

!yt cat videos (works)

cat videos !yt (works)

cat !yt videos (not working)

cat videos!yt (not working)

I always prefix but I did that on ddg too, because chromium's tab search thingy has trained me to do it.

From a programmatic and practical point of view, I don't understand why would someone want to put a bang in the middle of a request or within a word.

Basically you have your request and you add a criteria on it, not in it.

It's like ordering at a restaurant : you wouldn't say "I'll have a burger to take away, some fries and a coke". You either specify how you'll have your order before or after the actual order. And you don't create a new word like "a cokedinein".

Furthermore, I want Kagi to be able to reply to the request "how do the !g bang works?"; if I want something else to reply, I'll add the relevant bang around my request.

Or I'm missing something?

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