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All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

mosermichael.github.io

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Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#92
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 use this frequently with stuff like mdn, where I know the exact page and which search terms will get me there, but it's not worth bookmarking (I have Firefox set to only autocomplete bookmarks, not history). For example, "justify-content mdn !"

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#95
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…

A more common pattern for me is:

Search

   foo
Didn't get a good result

Search

   foo !bar
With more specialized or different search engine (foo was already in my browser search bar, so adding !bar is easy).

Or simply

   foo !w
If I already know I'm searching in Wikipedia or whatever else specific. I think this feature is very neat.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#98
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just realized I need this for myself and quickly cooked up a solution using tridactyl, ddgr, and jq that fits perfectly in my workflow. Everything is reduced to just typing `:cp ` without moving to a new tab or losing flow. The entire function is basically this (requires Tridactyl native messenger). command cp js -p tri.native.run('cd ~ && ddgr --json -n 1 ' +JS_ARG + '| jq -r ".[0].url" | xclip -sel clip') [1] htt…

Is this dangerous if the link is able to inject Bash commands as the value of JS_ARG? If so, that's RCE and that's bad. Is it possible to do this using the HTML5 clipboard functions instead?

Maybe, but I'm pretty sure browsers block the clipboard functions unless they were triggered via user input. I don't know if a page load counts as a valid trigger.

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#99
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 use !g often because google is a bit better at finding error messages, while DDG seems to search more for individual terms within the error message

Re: All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

#100
I love the concept of bang operators, but sadly my usage is limited to:

- `!g` if I can't find what I am looking for and am ready for a different angle.

- `!` + another letter than g, typed my mistake. This results in an annoying search on the wrong site (e.g., Flickr) or even more random.

This must puzzle anyone analyzing search logs on Flickr. Why are users searching for obscure Python error messages?!

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