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Search Bangs

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Re: Search Bangs

#51

Post by Jaruzel »

snarkyturtle wrote: post #39
stephengillie wrote: post #36

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!

What we actually needs is a web standard list (via API) that provides the shortcuts and the search URL like so (as an example):

  !gh { https://github.com/search&q=$QUERY$ }
  !ebay { http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?&_nkw=$QUERY$ }
Then all browsers (and other apps) could provide these standard shortcuts in their search functions.

Re: Search Bangs

#53

Post by aptwebapps »

Pretty neat. I was curious how a general search would work on a travel site but '!kayak iah' or '!kayak houston' just dumps me on kayak.com after a few redirects.

Re: Search Bangs

#54

Post by arm »

tagawa wrote: post #49
losingkeys wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, now I see why that was happening to me in the past. I was doing a search to find out about a command in some program that began with a backslash (a search query like: \COMMANDNAME), and was wondering why I kept being redirected to some random website.

Re: Search Bangs

#55

Post by ojii »

Jaruzel wrote: post #51
snarkyturtle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

What we actually needs is a web standard list (via API) that provides the shortcuts and the search URL like so (as an example): !gh { https://github.com/search&q=$QUERY$ } !ebay { http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?&_nkw=$QUERY$ } Then all browsers (and other apps) could provide these standard shortcuts in their search functions.

We have such a standard http://www.opensearch.org/Home. This works at least in chrome, so if I want to search github, in the address bar I enter "gsearch term".

Re: Search Bangs

#56

Post by kevindeasis »

This is pretty cool. I'll start using DDG specifically for this feature as I can never remember the full path for search queries on different sites that I go to

Re: Search Bangs

#57

Post by cpeterso »

tagawa wrote: post #48
cpeterso wrote: 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.

Thanks!

* !d20srd (D&D reference search) and its alias !d20 are 404. There is also !srd, which searches the same site but actually works. These bangs should be merged.

* !zillow (real estate search for an address) will show the neighborhood the address is in, but not the exact match. Search for the same, pre-populated address on the site shows the exact match. This is a problem with the way DDG is encoding of the search terms.

* FIXED: !blekko still existed (and was broken) even though the service had been shut down after the company was acquired by IBM.

Re: Search Bangs

#58

Post by wlkr »

746F7475 wrote: post #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

Sorry for the meta post but I don't understand why your comment was down voted. It seems a few people in this thread have been down voting any criticism of DDG, which is a misuse of the feature.

Re: Search Bangs

#59

Post by Jaruzel »

ojii wrote: post #55
Jaruzel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we actually needs is a web standard list (via API) that provides the shortcuts and the search URL like so (as an example): !gh { https://github.com/search&q=$QUERY$ } !ebay { http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?&_nkw=$QUERY$ } Then all browsers (and other apps) could provide these standard shortcuts in their search functions.

We have such a standard http://www.opensearch.org/Home . This works at least in chrome, so if I want to search github, in the address bar I enter "g search term ".

Wasn't aware of this, thanks.

Reading the site though, it seems poorly adopted? And also not automated (the user has to actively install SearchProviders? Most users don't bother.)

Re: Search Bangs

#60

Post by tagawa »

arm wrote: post #54
tagawa wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, now I see why that was happening to me in the past. I was doing a search to find out about a command in some program that began with a backslash (a search query like: \COMMANDNAME), and was wondering why I kept being redirected to some random website.

Ahem, sorry about that! That's our "I'm feeling ducky" trigger: https://duck.co/help/results/syntax
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