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Search Bangs

duckduckgo.com

41–50 of 83 posts

Re: Search Bangs

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can live without the bang, you could just add a search engine to Chrome with the text "gh". Then, prepending "gh" to a search would just search Github.

The thing about bangs is that it's a curated, auto-updating list of shortcuts though. I could install my own but with ddg, I just throw a ! in front of the site and usually it works!

Chrome auto added Github search in my url bar - gsearch.

Re: Search Bangs

#42

I have keyword searches [1] set up in Firefox for the sites I want quick access to. It does the same thing, but is browser-based. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

I use search engine selection in Firefox, too. /d/ is for duckduckgo. With bangs, I can type "d !whois ycombinator.com" in the location box and hit the whois record.

Re: Search Bangs

#44
post #35

I use bangs very frequently and quite like them. Probably the ones I use most are !gh to search github or !npm to search npm (although npmsearch.com is often more useful). One thing I wish I could do was combine the first-result bang (!) with other bangs (like !gh). That would translate into "take me to the first result on github for these search terms..."

npmsearch.com has its own bang! !npms

That's great, thanks for letting me know!

Re: Search Bangs

#45
post #31

I use bangs very frequently and quite like them. Probably the ones I use most are !gh to search github or !npm to search npm (although npmsearch.com is often more useful). One thing I wish I could do was combine the first-result bang (!) with other bangs (like !gh). That would translate into "take me to the first result on github for these search terms..."

Good idea but I think that wouldn't be practically possible. We redirect you to third-party sites but we don't know what the first results on those sites are. Technically I suppose it's possible to "scrape ahead" and get the top result in the background before redirecting the user, but some sites change search results based on your profile/behaviour so it could be inaccurate. It may also be against those sites' terms…

I agree it's not something that could be practically possible. I think I'd hate if it worked for some bangs but not all, so I'm content with just having to do an extra click.

Re: Search Bangs

#46
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where google has lost me is on country detection. It's virtually impossible to change country context. NCR feature disappeared, and even choosing a specific language for the search results won't prevent some results from one's country to bubble up at the top (i.e. if I am in France, setting the interface in english and asking results for 'any region' will still boost french results) It's just huge PITA to search for…

Websites that choose display language based on IP address is the bane of my existence and google is the absolute worst site for doing this. I used to use ncr constantly for any google related task. I don't trust google enough any more to log in and set language preferences - I only allow their web properties to store session cookies when needed. The best I can do with google is to write a dumb greasemonkey script to…

Oh nice, I agree... normally I don't have the problem since I pretty much constantly use VPN-Servers in english-speaking locations, but whenever I don't or are on another machine it's somewhat "weird" and frustrating. Valid criticism.

So I guess from their part it's a feature, user-friendliness, they have to serve the layman and the professional. If one uses a Google Account, you probably can tweak this with some settings?

Re: Search Bangs

#47
Wish Google would support this. Then again I've already become accustomed to writing !g at the end of all my search queries.

I love bangs, but DDG's results are still very subpar

Re: Search Bangs

#48
post #4

I've run into a few bangs that no longer work. I tried reporting the broken bangs on Twitter and the DDG bug reporter, but I received no reply and they're still broken. I'm surprised DDG doesn't have automated monitoring of every bang API they use. They should have daily or hourly health check queries to confirm valid HTTP responses or even expected search results.

Hi. Do you have a list of the bangs that don't work for you? I can forward them to be looked into.

Re: Search Bangs

#49
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good idea but I think that wouldn't be practically possible. We redirect you to third-party sites but we don't know what the first results on those sites are. Technically I suppose it's possible to "scrape ahead" and get the top result in the background before redirecting the user, but some sites change search results based on your profile/behaviour so it could be inaccurate. It may also be against those sites' terms…

What about sort of appending site:GitHub.com and going to the first result there? Not always the first result you'd see, but it might work okay.

Now that's an interesting idea. It's already possible using the `\` trigger, e.g.:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=\getusermedia+site%3Astackoverflow...

but a short syntax such as `\!so getusermedia` is a potential alternative. I'll suggest it to the team.

Re: Search Bangs

#50
post #7

Is there a really good in-depth up-to-date comparison somewhere between duckduckgo and google? For example: I don't see any advantage in those search bangs, simply searching "shoes amazon" on google will do the job, or if I really want to search a specific site one can easily do "shoes site: amazon.com", and considering all the other things google can do... duckduckgo might do some of those things, some of those even…

The advantage over Google is that DuckDuckGo is private.

https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

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