I much prefer that the browser fulfills this role instead of the search engine.<p>Like in chrome you can start typing "yt" [Tab] and search youtube<p>Or in Firefox you can setup keywords and do "yt" [space] and search.
I find bangs lacking from a UX perspective. It's not that I struggle to use them, like most of you I'm used to the terminal and text-based interfaces, but it just seems like a bad form of feature discovery for non-technically literate people.<p>It would be nice if this sort of domain filtering could be done with the UI instead of relying on the bang itself (by all means leave it in for power users). You could just check a checkbox and a separate text box would appear for typing in the domain you want to filter on.
I am a long time DDG user, going on 4 years? I am just now starting to revert back to google more and more as I start to find their results lacking. The main problem I have with bangs is that my mental mode for searching is always going directly to the search string first. The friction of having to back out of that and insert a bang is too much. I would love to be able to add the bang at the end, as it is often then that I realize a particular search string would be better suited for google or some other service (but mostly google). I'll send them that suggestion.
The problem with ! is that it's a shifted character, so it's not a good choice for something which you use many times a day. An unshifted character would be better. E.g. comma: ,w for wikipedia
Privacy is cool and all but this is the main reason I use DDG. I use the ! constantly. It makes search so much faster and enjoyable. I can go straight to what I want.
I switched back to google after more than a year using duckduckgo, the results were just not as good as Google.<p>However I'm still using the !bangs which are just an awesome feature, I higly recommend using <a href="http://www.duckduckgoog.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.duckduckgoog.com/</a> which provides bangs on top of google search.
I recently switched to DDG and while the results sometimes aren't as good as Google, the feeling of not worrying what my searches will do to my filter bubble is priceless. I realize I'm still tracked and profiled in a million other ways, but any improvement is welcome. The bangs are a nice touch, but much less important to me.
This idea was tried 15 yrs ago or so.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20040612211249/http://www.osx.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20040612211249/http://www.osx.co...</a>
This is a great presentation of the feature and a good directory to learn more about the bangs available. I use them all the time, usually regarding programming topics (language reference, GitHub, etc.), but now I see there are many more I could start using. !astock for Adobe Stock is just one example. Great feature! (I have DDG as my default in Safari so searching and using bangs is a breeze.)
Such a fantastic feature. I can even search through Unity's docs, right from my search bar. Sure, DDG can be a little behind with search, but the bang feature more than makes up for it IMHO. I probably use DDG for ~80% of searches and it gets the job done. It is a small price to pay for peace of mind. Keep up the good work!
Interesting but probably not very useful.<p>Major public websites invest heavily in SEO. So practically speaking, what the user actually wants can often be better surfaced with Google (which draws upon a great number of signals) than with on-site search (which could merely be backed by elasticsearch or by a relatively simple homegrown system).
I use DDG kind of in the same way that I use multiple web browsers, where I <i>prefer</i> everything locked down in Firefox but occasionally sites won’t work very well unless I switch to Safari without add-ons running. Sometimes you just need Google results.<p>Also, DDG+g! is a great way to get de-AMPed Google results on mobile.
Several years ago I built <a href="https://shortmarks.com" rel="nofollow">https://shortmarks.com</a> as a way to use search shortcuts from any browser. The code isn't pretty and I haven't updated it in eons, but it works well enough.
Here's my collection of favorite DDG bangs: <a href="http://duckgobang.com" rel="nofollow">http://duckgobang.com</a>. It's my way of getting people off the Google habit and to try bangs instead.
It took me some conscious effort, but I finally managed to train myself to make DuckDuckGo my default search engine.<p>I was vaguely aware of bangs, but I had not known how many other search engines it can tap into, this is really cool.
A discussion from 2016: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772034" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772034</a>
Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines, click to add a custom search engine and add search engines with short keywords. For example you can add "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s"" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s"</a> with the keyword "y", then if you type "y whatever" in the omnibar it will search "whatever" on youtube. The big draw back is that you won't get search suggestions when using a keyword.<p>Here are my most used custom search engines:<p>w <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s</a> search wikipedia using wikipedia's search engine<p>ww <a href="https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%s&btn...</a> search wikipedia through google and open the first result<p>h <a href="https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%s" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%...</a> results only from hacker news<p>r <a href="https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s</a> only search results from reddit<p>y <a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s</a> youtube<p>b <a href="http://93.174.95.27/search.php?req=%s" rel="nofollow">http://93.174.95.27/search.php?req=%s</a> search for books on libgen<p>m <a href="https://www.google.ca/maps/search/%s" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.ca/maps/search/%s</a> google maps<p>wo <a href="https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s</a> wolfram alpha<p>ima <a href="https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s</a> google image search (I tried using "i" and "im", but those are often part of my query)<p>s <a href="https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s</a> search stack overflow through google<p>st <a href="https://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s" rel="nofollow">https://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s</a> search all stack exchange sites through their search engine