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Comment by Vik1ng | Hacker News Reader

• Specialized search is making inroads.

>>> !Bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

Personally it's not really my thing, but a lot of users really seem to love this, especially when having DuckDuckGo as default search bar.

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And I agree OpenStreetMap will probably be a really big factor in the future. Especially considering how objects can be directly linked to Wikidata and other services.

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It really shines for me, since I have pentadactyl installed in my firefox. From the blank tab page, I can be searching github (or the python docs, or <insert one of the multitude of !searches here) with the following keystrokes:

  o !github language:python

'o' tells pentadactyl to go to a url. When I don't give it a URL it instead sends what I type to my default search engine.

The funny thing is that unless I am actually searching DDG, I almost never see it.

Sure you could do this by defining a whole bunch of search aliases, but it is more fun to think, "I wonder if I can search the Arch Wiki from here," type `o !arch some search`, and all of a sudden find yourself on the arch wiki search page.

That's a great UI synergy. Also, I had no idea Pentadactyl[1] existed. What an interesting plugin, thanks for bringing it up!

[1] http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/

Pentadactyl or vimperator. I can never remember which one is being currently developed. I mostly use vimperator on Firefox. Installed it as a total lark and found almost instantly that I loved it.

There's also VimFx which is also actively developed.

Pentadactyl is the one currently being developed. I believe it was forked from vimperator when vimperator development stalled.

OSM are also hitting Google via sites and API licensing and limitations. That's an increasing pain point.

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