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Comment by mdturnerphys | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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...

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 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.

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