Bong: DuckDuckGo bang alternative, open-source and self-hosted | Hacker News Reader

Bong: DuckDuckGo bang alternative, open-source and self-hosted

bong.glendalab.com

Do you really need a server implementation for this? Surely you could achieve this with a browser extension that grabs queries which begin with "!" and then has a mapping table of postfixes to query formats?

Browsers already support programmable search keywords. (Firefox does at least) I‘m using those quite a bit.

For anyone looking for it: here is the documentation: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox#w_how...

I'm the author of this project, and I've actually been using it myself since I started it in 2022. The main reason was that DDG wasn't managing their list at all at the time, and another need was mobile web browsers, where extensions are not really as approachable as on PC. Also, the default "." is way easier to locate than "!" on mobile keyboards, and the prefix is configurable.

Kagi maintains an updated set of open bangs at https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs

I made `!` easier to type on mobile via double-space (double-tap SPACE to insert `!` similar to how macOS/iOS adds a period with double-space): https://whiz.leftium.com

Still a work in progress; I need to make the UI more intuitive: https://github.com/Leftium/whiz/

Maybe to support noscript/basic HTML browsers?

You can actually do better than a browser extension via service workers: after the first download, it runs from the server.

You can even configure this as your default search engine so searches from the omnibar work: https://whiz.leftium.com/go

Source code: https://github.com/Leftium/whiz/blob/main/src/service-worker...

What is this? The link is to a demo with just a text search field?

This is confusing.

the website is just a search engine. Doesn't explain what it does differently.

The name is "Bong" which I assume is a play on an unrelated search engine Bing. What does DDG have to do with this other than some shared search engine results?

It's a play on bang, not bing. DuckDuckGo popularized searches with a bang ("!"), so that from the DDG page you could do a search on Wikipedia for example, without navigating to Wikipedia first and searching there. Other search engines use it too, like Kagi for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Bangs

https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html

Well, I just probably am not going to use a software product named “bong” but I suppose that’s just me.

I think the issue with running something like this or SearXNG is that the good indexes will fight your efforts to use them unless you pay up and use the API. This product also suggests the google smart suggest API in the default config, which isn’t very much of a Google decoupling.

I run SearXNG (and Crawl4AI) for my self hosted librechat (self hosted chatgpt equivalent that can search, use Internet etc).

Duckduckgo.com and bing tend to respond well as well as Staan after an account is created with them.

But what we need is competition between few large search providers, because prices now are bonkers. The only large-ish search provider that doesn't just repackaged Google or Bing is Brave, but they charge $5 for 1k requests. That is just silly. 1k will not last more than two dozen uses (each chat fires off 10-20 searches).

What about gimp? Would you use that?

I'll learn it in your stead, and figure out why along the way.

(just out of spite and DDG is stepping up like MapQuest)

We should open-source-crowdfund DDG.com to freedirect to them.

On that basis I also avoid touch, finger, fsck, git, GIMP, lame, and coq.

Do you apply the same standards to windows systems and social networks spelled the same as a popular slang term for ecstasy? It's the abysimal architecture and Nazis the repell me, not the spelling.

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