Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need DDG for that. Both Firefox and Chrome support adding shortcut keywords for search boxes. For example, in Firefox all you have to do is to right click on a search box and select "Add Keyword for this Search". It's much better than DDG because: 1) if you care about privacy, then this is obviously the right way, as you don't have to redirect through a third-party's server 2) you can add shortcuts for what…
I haven't played with Firefox keywords really but isn't the saved search still going through whatever the default search engine is (in Firefox, Google)? [Update] I guess my point is that DDG has it ready to go and the syntax is usually easy enough to figure out without building up one's own keyword list. Maybe I'm missing something, but it just seems that DDG offers a better solution.
When I enter into the address bar: "d turkey trot [return]" Firefox turns that into "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=turkey trot" and initiates the DDG search.
But you can use the same FF keyword feature to auto-generate a URL for any site. If you go to BoingBoing a lot, you could just enter 'bb [return]'.
[Note: some of the DDG 'bangs' are out of date ... try !js]