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All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

mosermichael.github.io

51–60 of 140 posts

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#51

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.

That's a good suggestion, though DDG has a financial incentive to keep users going through DDG's search page. OTOH, DDG created and supports bang shortcuts so they want people to use them. :)

DDG could show a bang suggestion if any of the top search results are for sites that have bang shortcuts. Or suggest "Didn't find what you're looking for? Try !g" if the number of results found is small.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#52
post #27

The only operator I use is "!", which is DDG's version of "I am feeling lucky". And I only use this because Google's silently phasing out the functionality[1]. 1. https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/15794018

I filed a support request with StartPage.com to offer the "I'm Feeling Lucky" functionality and never got a response. Maybe if more people ask...

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would call my use of bangs getting to a specific page on another site rather that searching another site. For instance, I get a lot of use out of the wolfram alpha bang, !wa, in those uses I'm not searching as much as I'm inputting a calculation for wolfram alpha to perform and the bang let's me skip a step by typing "!wa {quety/calculation}" into my address bar. Similarly, if ddg is your default search engine, you…

I have a similar use case with wordreference. I type '!wr wordtodefine' to get the definition of a word.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#54
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)

shoot an email to jared@smell.flowers and i'll tell ya some thoughts in richer detail if it helps or is interesting to you :)

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#57
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 use boardreader.com when I'm searching discussion boards. Maybe there's a bang for boardreader?

edit: Actually there is !brd

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#58
post #48

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 fas…

I built a simple node JS server to use as my default search engine. What you describe could be a 2-line change to my code. My motivation was using Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" without JS. The node app detects the "!lucky" bang, downloads the search results, finds the first link, and redirects to it. Let me know if it interests you.

I'm not perfectly understanding of such legalities, so correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't this be infringing on scraping territory?

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#59
post #27

The only operator I use is "!", which is DDG's version of "I am feeling lucky". And I only use this because Google's silently phasing out the functionality[1]. 1. https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/15794018

Goddamn, thats fun! I didn't know this was a thing.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#60
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built a simple node JS server to use as my default search engine. What you describe could be a 2-line change to my code. My motivation was using Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" without JS. The node app detects the "!lucky" bang, downloads the search results, finds the first link, and redirects to it. Let me know if it interests you.

I'm not perfectly understanding of such legalities, so correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't this be infringing on scraping territory?

Scraping may violate of Google's own acceptable use policy, but it's not illegal.
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