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Comment by JasonSage | Hacker News Reader

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..."

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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.

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

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.)

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!

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