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Search Bangs

duckduckgo.com

123 pointsbrudgers77 comments

ddg is my default and this is the killer feature for me.

I type in "houston !gmaps" and right to google maps focused on Houston. I copy paste "[error] !so" and get relevant stack overflow search, "[actor] !imdb" etc.

Blekko used to do this really well - I stopped using it when it seemed to be turing into an SEO tool instead of a search engine several years back.

But if you type "dragon book amazon" into Google, it will do exactly what was intended. No bangs needed.

To make matters worse, if I type "dragon book" into the Amazon search bar directly, I'm getting the wrong results.

(Both searches done from a fresh incognito tab.)

How do you know what was intended? Amazon is more than just a domain name.

On Google, "dragon book amazon" lands me on a Google page.

On DDG, "dragon book !amazon" lands me on an Amazon search result page.

Very different. By adding one !, I saved a whole page load and render, and having to click on a result.

I guess you're arguing that Google's search is better than Amazon's. In some ways, assuming that you're looking for the compilers book, it is. I'd argue that it doesn't show cover thumbnails and stuff like that, so it's a toss up. But this is one example out of many. I think the wikipedia bang is very useful, for example.

Just FYI, !gm works the same as !gmaps

I love DDG, so, it oddly irked me to see someone spell out "gmaps" instead of "gm". Odd how much I was bothered by those few letters. Brevity!

I had no idea the bangs didn't have to be the be the first thing you enter. My life is now a lot easier, thanks!

I have keyword searches [1] set up in Firefox for the sites I want quick access to. It does the same thing, but is browser-based.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

The lack of discoverability of certain features of Firefox is disappointing. They got rid of Tab Groups due to lack of popularity/usage and I'm sure Keyword Searches are just as unpopular and just as unused. It makes me wonder when they'll get the ax too.

The benefit of setting it up from within your browser is you can control the keyword/"bang". While plenty of mine are the same as the ones that exist on DDG! plenty are also different.

I feel a lot of time and effort is wasted re-implementing things that already exist in a browser without significantly altering/changing the functionality.

ps to Chrome users: Chrome also has the same functionality if you right click most any search bar, you can add keywords to search.

I use ddg, but I also have a bunch of keyword searches in firefox too (about 25) because they've been supported for longer than ddg and I seem to spend more time in the URL bar than the search box. It was a joy to find the keyword search extension for firefox [1] that provides a context menu and let's you highlight text on a page and choose from one of your keyword searches from a ciontext menu.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keyword-bookm...

I use that too. One of Bangs' advantage is it has suggestions, so I don't have to memorize all the keywords I've set. Of course, Bangs work with keyword search (e.g. du !amazon alice in wonderland), but you lose the suggestion.

In any case I mostly use keywords to search google, youtube, and wikipedia in several languages, so I don't see bangs having much utility for me.

I use search engine selection in Firefox, too. /d/ is for duckduckgo. With bangs, I can type "d !whois ycombinator.com" in the location box and hit the whois record.

I use bangs very frequently and quite like them.

Probably the ones I use most are !gh to search github or !npm to search npm (although npmsearch.com is often more useful).

One thing I wish I could do was combine the first-result bang (!) with other bangs (like !gh). That would translate into "take me to the first result on github for these search terms..."

Good idea but I think that wouldn't be practically possible. We redirect you to third-party sites but we don't know what the first results on those sites are.

Technically I suppose it's possible to "scrape ahead" and get the top result in the background before redirecting the user, but some sites change search results based on your profile/behaviour so it could be inaccurate. It may also be against those sites' terms and conditions.

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.

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

I agree it's not something that could be practically possible. I think I'd hate if it worked for some bangs but not all, so I'm content with just having to do an extra click.

npmsearch.com has its own bang! !npms

I feel like ddg's instant results for 'npm foo' is a lot more accurate than both of these suggestions.

That's great, thanks for letting me know!

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!

Chrome auto added Github search in my url bar - g<Tab>search.

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<tab>search term<enter>".

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.)

I see this happening only in !cpan1 it takes you to first result based on the keyword on metacpan.org

Is there a really good in-depth up-to-date comparison somewhere between duckduckgo and google?

For example: I don't see any advantage in those search bangs, simply searching "shoes amazon" on google will do the job, or if I really want to search a specific site one can easily do "shoes site: amazon.com", and considering all the other things google can do...

duckduckgo might do some of those things, some of those even well, but I don't know, therefore the question about a detailed comparison... in google:

search literally by using quotation marks "to be or not to be", show weather, stocks, definitions, times, calculate anything, you can even do stuff like "notebook 200$..300$" which searches in that specific price range, currency and number conversion, exclude some search terms, flight information and lots more... whenever I read of something about supposedly awesome duckduckgo-features, it seems like the author(s) don't know a lot about google's capabilities... or I guess don't mention it on purpose. Many don't know about google's capabilities I guess, and then they might go "look what duckduckgo can do", ehm "google has been capable of that for x years"...

and by the way: last I checked google was immensely superior in search term results (even without the bubbling effect)

I frequently use !js which searches only the JavaScript portion of the Mozilla Developer Network.

You can also always use the Google search results - without being profiled - by using !g (aka, best of both worlds)

simply searching "shoes amazon" will do the job, or if I really want to search a specific site one can easily do "shoes site: amazon.com"

The search bangs take you directly to the search implementation of the site in question. Sometimes this is preferred to a Google search. If you try "!amazon shoes" on DDG and "amazon shoes" on Google, you can see the difference. Basically, in any case where you would type something into a site's search box (instead of Google's), it saves you a click or from having to navigate to that site first.

Oh I see... just tried it, k, can see why some like that feature, I actually think it's something a search engine isn't supposed to do, but ok, thanks for the hint :)

@neurobuddha has also been blogging about specific !bangs which is even more enlightening - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11773901 (his post is currently buried below, but he totally deserves all the karma!)

or just "!a" for amazon.

Where google has lost me is on country detection. It's virtually impossible to change country context.

NCR feature disappeared, and even choosing a specific language for the search results won't prevent some results from one's country to bubble up at the top (i.e. if I am in France, setting the interface in english and asking results for 'any region' will still boost french results)

It's just huge PITA to search for resources in a global context, which is the majority of my searches. DDG is a lot more sensible and manageable in this respect.

Websites that choose display language based on IP address is the bane of my existence and google is the absolute worst site for doing this. I used to use ncr constantly for any google related task. I don't trust google enough any more to log in and set language preferences - I only allow their web properties to store session cookies when needed. The best I can do with google is to write a dumb greasemonkey script to add 'hl=en' to any google URLs.

Oh nice, I agree... normally I don't have the problem since I pretty much constantly use VPN-Servers in english-speaking locations, but whenever I don't or are on another machine it's somewhat "weird" and frustrating. Valid criticism.

So I guess from their part it's a feature, user-friendliness, they have to serve the layman and the professional. If one uses a Google Account, you probably can tweak this with some settings?

> NCR feature disappeared

Have you tried using it again? I kept forgetting that it was gone, until one day it started working again.

There was this old thread with an alternative way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791018

I tried both but it seems still dead (or t's because I'm on mobile ?).

To be honest I don't think it will either come back. There is such a long trend of getting rid of generic searches that it seems that Google has a very natural incentive to do so.

I wouldn't be surprised that providing non localized search results has a very high cost (be it in performance, ad results or any other metric) on Google's side. It must feel logical in their position to reduce that cost to a minimum.

> it seems like the author(s) don't know a lot about google's capabilities

It seems to me Google is determined to keep its features a secret from users. Why isn't there an easy to use and easy to find advanced search screen?

The advantage over Google is that DuckDuckGo is private.

https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

But, let's say you want to look at images of shoes. If you google "shoe images", it brings you to the main search page for images, you have to click over to "Images" results.

if you DDG for: "!gi shoe images", it will automatically do this for you.

I was pleased to discover the Qwant[0] search engine recently and have found its results to be a significant improvement over those provided by DuckDuckGo. It also has some support for bangs (but the bang must be at the start of the query). I've come to rely a lot on bangs and would love to see this further supported; coincidentally I submitted feedback to them about this earlier today.

[0] https://www.qwant.com

This has been around for years

It was even discussed on HN four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4260964

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.

Thanks for the details. I've reported the d20 ones - there was also !d&d that should go to the same site.

For Zillow, it seems appending "_rb" to the end of the address makes it work so I've requested that. We do get hundreds of !bang suggestions and updates though, so it make take a little while.

Okay, this is pretty damn neat.

I just searched for "!a laptops" and was sent straight to Amazon's laptop search page.

I prefer Google's built into Chrome where you start typing (e.g.) amaz then let it autocomplete then press <tab> then search away. Easier than remembering bangs and gets me a headstart on somewhere I know I'm already going (youtube is another good one)

!gview is one of my favorite, quick pdf reader when the embedded ones fail to render correctly.

Good. Hat off to the Duckduckgo team. It's my major search engine now.

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

My most used bangs: ! (go to the first result) and !g (perform search on Google). Occasionally, I'll use !w (Wikipedia).

They really make it easy to get to where you wanted to go.

Anyone know how !g works, particularly in the context of Google's recent changes[1]?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11625633

It's unrelated. AKAIK !g is the equivalent of:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=web%20search%20a...

https://www.quora.com/What-is-encrypted-google-com

!gis (google image) and !gri (reverse image) are both quite useful.

A shorter bang to search google images: !i

Thank you! I had assumed !i was ddg images for some reason.

I use `!rustn` because it's more convenient than actually loading my local copy of the rust documentation.

Isn't this an old feature in DDG. I have used this two years back. Even added a !sulekha

!w for wikipedia is my favorite.

It's cool but I believe it will be better to have even autosuggest site specific. I mean if I search for !a shoes it should suggest me content from Amazon not from anywhere else.

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.

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.

So what is the difference between this and google's "site:"? The latter works for any site, there is no need for a custom list of 8000 sites.

"site:amazon.com" vs "!a" saves 13 characters.

Google `site:wikipedia.org` search (which also works in DuckDuckGo) uses Google's interface and index, i.e., you get a Google search results page. With Search Bangs, you get a search results page using that uses a websites own engine, e.g., it's filling out a search term with a template like `http://wikipedia.org/?search=*`.

This is actually very old idea that used to be implemented in various browsers and extensions. Here's a support page for Fireboxes implementation, which might still work[1]. Personally, I do this on OS X with LaunchBar Search Templates[2], which is nice because it's browser agnostic.

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

[2]: https://www.obdev.at/resources/launchbar/help/SearchTemplate...

Bangs use the other site's built-in search engine, not DDG's index of that site.

I would love a native mac client for this.

Like a browser? I'm confused at what else it could be.

There comes me with system wide keywords self customized on Alfred. Best productivity tip you can get

Duck Go !Bang: http://duckgobang.com is a blog that tests bangs (some listed on Duck Duck Go are broken) and showcases the most useful ones.

Bangs are such a cool search hack, I wonder why more people don't use it.

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