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All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

mosermichael.github.io

31–40 of 140 posts

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#31
For ages I've wanted DuckDuckGo to add a "!copy" bang, which acts like the "!" operator (automatically navigates to the first search result) but instead of going to the page, it copies the link to my clipboard.

There are plenty of projects I'm familiar with but don't know the canonical URL off the top of my head - when I link someone else to them I have to look up their homepage. This would make this process much faster.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#32
post #10

So these all just directly search for that term on the (usually substandard) internal website search box? I don't get the appeal. I want the bang to show a good/filtered SERP, not load some other site directly. (similar to a `site:x` search on Google I guess.) What I'd really like to use is a search engine that had custom ranking of domains. I'd heavily weigh it to only show Stack Exchange, Reddit, and forum posts. O…

I've always been in the "I don't get it" boat with DDG bang operators. When I last tried switching it to my default search engine, I felt like any time I needed to search DDG for "!{bang} {query}" I could have just searched Google for "{query}" and gotten the result I was looking for. In many cases, Google will give even better results for siteX than siteX's own search, because Google is likely to correct for things like common spelling errors or word substitutions.

Granted, I haven't given DDG an earnest try in a couple of years, so the DDG non-bang search results may have gotten better, but the fact that their bangs are still heavily touted as a killer feature doesn't give me much faith.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#33
post #10

So these all just directly search for that term on the (usually substandard) internal website search box? I don't get the appeal. I want the bang to show a good/filtered SERP, not load some other site directly. (similar to a `site:x` search on Google I guess.) What I'd really like to use is a search engine that had custom ranking of domains. I'd heavily weigh it to only show Stack Exchange, Reddit, and forum posts. O…

> I don't get the appeal.

Bangs are nice as a quick shortcut to specialized search engines like etymology online, google image search, wikipedia, or whatever.

You can set up your browser to do this (some keyword changes the search), but it's convenient that DDG already has it built in, so the only setup needs to be switching your default search engine.

I don't know why anyone would ever use DDG's bangs feature if it wasn't their default search engine. That's just a weird extra step.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#34
post #7

Heck yeah! Some ideas for ya: 1) We can ctrl-f to search obv, but add a filter up top that just fuzzies anything matching 2) Let me condense the header of a category, like how comments can hide their children in here 3) Both of the links in an entry go to the same thing, ala: `discworld` and `!discworld` can be clicked to do the same thing, populate the box up top, which _does_ let you click & press return. But it mi…

thanks for the suggestions! (unfortunately I am not a big expert in frontend stuff, i usually copy stuff from stack overflow)

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#35
post #24
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah those are basically the same (and came first), but you have to define and maintain them yourself.

Is there some way to add a big list of search keywords to Firefox without having to type them one by one in the settings screen? I've been trying to figure out how to do this for years now with no luck.

1. Open the bookmarks view (probably Menu → Library → Bookmarks or Ctrl+Shift+B; not sure on macOS).

2. In the toolbar, within the Import & Backup menu button, use Backup… or Export Bookmarks to HTML….

3. Observe the file format (JSON for one, HTML for the other) and replicate its effects for all the items you wish to add.

4. Restore or import your new bookmarks.

I haven’t actually done this for over a decade. I suspect the backup/restore route might replace all bookmarks and the export/import route might just add new bookmarks, but I don’t know.

What I’d really like is an extension that could manage all of these (sync with DuckDuckGo’s bangs, allow enabling and disabling individually, by group, &c., renaming bangs), but Mozilla have said “We have no plans to allow adding search engine dynamically via WebExtensions. We've had too many problems with hijacking.” (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1268401#c37.) So anything like this would need to be a program that could run locally and either mess with Firefox’s databases directly (places.sqlite, I think), or provide you with the relevant files for you to import manually. I’ve thought of making such a thing, but I’ve not done it yet. Part of the reason is lack of a good data source: for using DuckDuckGo bangs, you need a list that includes the destination of each bang, which I don’t think they provide in any principled way, so you’d be left just polling them.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#36
post #10

So these all just directly search for that term on the (usually substandard) internal website search box? I don't get the appeal. I want the bang to show a good/filtered SERP, not load some other site directly. (similar to a `site:x` search on Google I guess.) What I'd really like to use is a search engine that had custom ranking of domains. I'd heavily weigh it to only show Stack Exchange, Reddit, and forum posts. O…

Personally I use !yt (YouTube), !py3 (Python 3 docs), and !w (Wikipedia) very often, and !g (Google) sometimes.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#37
post #10

So these all just directly search for that term on the (usually substandard) internal website search box? I don't get the appeal. I want the bang to show a good/filtered SERP, not load some other site directly. (similar to a `site:x` search on Google I guess.) What I'd really like to use is a search engine that had custom ranking of domains. I'd heavily weigh it to only show Stack Exchange, Reddit, and forum posts. O…

I've always been in the "I don't get it" boat with DDG bang operators. When I last tried switching it to my default search engine, I felt like any time I needed to search DDG for "!{bang} {query}" I could have just searched Google for "{query}" and gotten the result I was looking for. In many cases, Google will give even better results for siteX than siteX's own search, because Google is likely to correct for things…

The most obvious reason why you'd use DDG is for the privacy aspects and the bang operators make it super easy to quickly use Google for those times you need it which limits the amount of information they have.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#39
post #10

So these all just directly search for that term on the (usually substandard) internal website search box? I don't get the appeal. I want the bang to show a good/filtered SERP, not load some other site directly. (similar to a `site:x` search on Google I guess.) What I'd really like to use is a search engine that had custom ranking of domains. I'd heavily weigh it to only show Stack Exchange, Reddit, and forum posts. O…

I agree for many many sites, but do sometimes find it useful - specifically when you know exactly what you want from a particular site, but don't know the URL. Example: !deb for debian package information.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#40

It would add to discoverability if a reminder of the bang appeared besides the search results (could be under a config setting), that way one could learn the bangs associated with their most used sites easily.

you get a help text in a tooltip (hover text) with the URL of the search engine - when the mouse hovers over the link; I think that adding the url directly to the table entry might clutter up the page.
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