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Comment by jemfinch | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see someone laud ddg's !bang searches, I ask myself, "What makes managing your browser's configuration so damn hard?" I go to Chrome's "settings", I click "Manage Search Engines", and I update the keyword. Why is this so hard for some people?

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I know that the !bang list is extensive. I know that most of the time using the full name of the site will work. Thus, I can reasonably guess how to directly search a site that I may not have even been to in years... or ever been to. If I want to know how much Wal-Mart is selling Bounty paper towels for, I can type "bounty paper towels !walmart" and I know it will work even though I may never have searched Wal-Mart's site before.

That's just one reason. Some more:

A single search interface. The Firefox search box lets you pick multiple search engines, but then a different one is selected each time. For me, DDG is always selected.

I can change my search target without retyping my query. I type my searches into Firefox's search box and I always type the !bang part at the end of the search. If I don't like the results at Amazon, I can go change "!amazon" to "!newegg" and quickly re-search another site. I also frequently use this to redirect failed mathematical queries to Google or Wolfram Alpha just by going and appending a "!g" or "!wa" on the search.

As someone else mentioned, portability. I don't need to ever configure another search engine list as long as I live. My list on my work computer install of Firefox is always up-to-date with my mobile and with my home Chrome install. If I get a new computer or switch to a new browser, it's already ready to go.

It updates itself. If a new site comes along (or I discover a site new to me), I'll have the search ready to go long before I ever thought to search it (or configure it) myself.

I can change my search target without retyping my query. I agree with most of your post but this part doesn't seem like an advantage. If I have my own list of search engines in FF, I can just pick a new one from the drop-down without even typing the name of each engine.

Point taken, but as a counterpoint... if your list was as extensive as the DDG !bang list, finding the one you want would be a real pain.

To be fair, you don't need to click around with Firefox's search bar. If you create a bookmark with a keyword, then typing the keyword on the main bar loads the website, and if you put an %s somewhere in that bookmark's url, you can then use it much like a bang, e.g.

    newegg ATI HD4200

That said, I can perfectly understand why you don't want to waste the time to set them up if someone has already done it for you.

And then you can't re-target (or fix a typo) in the same query in the same place, since the address bar will be replaced with the address of the loaded site. That's why I use the separate search bar.

You sound like one of the old Linux guys when somebody would say, "See? I can just click and change my resolution!" they'd go off about, "What's so hard about editing the X config file and finding the resolutions section and editing the right lines and then restarting X and ..."

Yes, I could spend my time adding custom searches to all of the browsers I use. Or I can just use DuckDuckGo and get most of the searches I want automatically and not spend any time at all.

Not to put too fine a point on it: in the olden days, you could change resolutions without either editing your Xconfig file or clicking anywhere, just by pressing Ctrl-Alt-(KP+/KP-). Most distributions disable that nowadays, because it tends to confuse people if they have a viewport larger than their screen.

That's another Old Linux Guy-ism, thinking that there's even a distinction between "viewport" and "resolution". When non-OLGs talk about "changing resolution", the don't mean, well, anything about view ports, because nobody thinks about view ports.

When did being labeled an old linux guy become a pejorative? Asks the linux guy since 0.99pre...

I wonder if a lot of that is the death of CRTs, which didn't have a "native" resolution. That's the one thing I really miss about old gaming. Playing something at 640x480 and having it look good, and not be resampled. Might be why the current crop of pixel-art indie games annoys me too, come to think of it. The natural slight blur from CRT overscan is gone.

Personally I'm with you, but one argument against us is that DDG !bangs work on any machine you're ever on, without having to set them up - which for some people is a big advantage.

When you tie a chrome browser to your google account, configuration gets shared across machines. I'm not sure how handy that is if you're often on machines you don't control, but for my use case (where I work with 3-4 different machines every day, but just those same machines) the shared state solves that problem.

Coming at it from the other direction: why should I have to spend my time configuring each search engine I want to use when I can just add DuckDuckGo and be done with it? The only material advantages to configuring the shortcuts in-browser are (a) you may want to use different shortcuts and (b) you may not want the ! prefix.

Chrome will automatically pick up the search box on any site you've been to and add it to its dictionary, no configuration required.

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