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Comment by Legion | Hacker News Reader

It's more than "slightly different".

By all means, try and replicate this complete list in your Chrome browser: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html. I'll wait...

What makes the DDG !bang system awesome is its enormity. You don't look up what !bang to use to search something. You assume it exists, do it, and 99% of the time, you're right. That's a game changer.

I don't write Perl, but I know !cpan exists. I don't even have to look. I don't even know exactly what site it's going to search. But I know if I !cpan twitter, I'm going to be looking at a list of Perl libraries for tweeting.

That's the DDG killer feature. You want to do some kind of site-specific search or lookup, you just type in the most logical sounding !bang and assume it will work. You're simply never going to replicate that inside your browser.

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You don't have to replicate the list. Why would you want to? If you've visited a site before and it has a search box on it that matches some heuristic, it gets added to your search engine list. Odds are, far more than 99% of the time, you're going to be searching a site you've already visited before. I agree it is very handy.

His main point has to do with finding new sites about specific topics. A different use case not met by Chrome's implementation.

It's actually a standard, not a heuristic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch

If the search box is nonstandard, you can also add it manually by right-clicking the search box and clicking "Add as Search Engine".

> You're simply never going to replicate that inside your browser.

Why not?

What makes the DDG !bang system awesome is its enormity.

Please don't tell me it's evil.

I believe you meant "scope", "scale", or "size".

Enormity has a neutral use as well.

> Usage note

> 3. Enormity has been in frequent and continuous use in the sense “immensity” since the 18th century: The enormity of the task was overwhelming. Some hold that enormousness is the correct word in that sense and that enormity can only mean “outrageousness” or “atrociousness”: The enormity of his offenses appalled the public.

>Please don't tell me it's evil.

I am a little confused by your comment - has the word "enormous" come to mean "evil"? If so, maybe this new came about from people referring to the "enormity of a crime". It seems to have followed a similar etymological evolution to the word "gross" as in "gross depravity". But both words just mean "big".

The word "enormity" means generally "evil": The state or quality of exceeding a measure or rule, or of being immoderate, monstrous, or outrageous. (1913 Webster).

It's not a general synonym for "enormous" or "having vast size", except by confusion.

Wow. Maybe it is an American English usage. In British English "enormous" is always used as a synonym for "huge", never for "evil". In fact, a quick google of the word revealed the former usage to be the more prevalent one. For instance, there is a famous children's story called "The enormous turnip" (adapted from a story by Tolstoy).

http://www.boomerangbooks.com.au/Enormous-Turnip/Katie-Dayne...

Obviously, the children's story uses "enormous" to imply that the turnip is very large, not very wicked. Somehow "the dastardly rutabaga" or "the heinous swede" makes a lot less sense in this context.

Edit: Admission - I used DDG (my default search engine), not google.

That's not what he's saying; he's saying that "enormity" isn't a synonym for "enormousness".

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