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Comment by snarkyturtle | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.)

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

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