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Comment by benbenhu | Hacker News Reader

And don't forget to use the bangs that can allow you to check other engines results fast if you need.

For people afraid of getting off google, you can always search something like '!g my-search', it works the same for youtube(!yt), google image(!gi), or even hackernews(!hn)

And of course the best bang is the 'I am feeling lucky' one (!), i.e.: 'hackernews !'

View on HN

    !ud → Urban Dictionary (what do you mean, she's 'office cute'?)
    !wen → Wikipedia English
    !w.. → Wikipedia (two letter language code, e.g., 'nl')
    !wikt Wiktionary

So many useful bangs.

So many bangs for you duck!

The best bang for your duck

Just a plain !w gives me English Wikipedia.

Usually if I need a certain engine I just guess the bang and it's usually supported and correct. !gm for google maps, !tineye for tineye, !wayback for the wayback machine...

They are pretty predictable. I just tried !osm madagascar on a whim, and it opens OpenStreetMap, as expected.

Setting DuckDuckGo as the search engine for your browser's address bar means all these bangs work right there whenever you open a new tab.

It depends on language settings. I have set DDG region to Canada and language to Canadian French. As a result, !w redirects mne to French Wikipedia.

    !hn does something or another

Some might be less useful tho, try:

!ddg google

Or if you are feeling lucky:

!!ddg google

edit: typo

I, too, switched to DDG, but sadly my most used bang is !g because in 1/3 cases DDG doesn't find what I am looking for.

Does DDG learn from what people !g for?

I would sincerely hope not! i.e. Tracking.

If that information isn't personalised in any fashion and the data are retained for a minimum period, I'd be OK with sorting out what types of queries aren't satisfied on DDG itself.

I would place my bet on that. That would be a query they need to work on.

It's worth noting that the !g bang redirects you to encrypted.google.com, it's more secure but results are often different from a regular www.google.com search. It bugged me for a while not knowing why some queries returned unusual results. ( more here https://duck.co/forum/thread/2880/remove-the-encrypted-subdo... )

www.google.com uses encryption too these days.

You are linking to a ~5 year old thread that is discussing the state of things well before google switched everything over to ssl.

For a while I believe the difference was specifically that encrypted.google.com exclusively used PFS SSL cipher suites

> linking to encrypted.google.com not only is not necessary but it prevents local search results from being displayed. e.g. no google.ro search results, only google.com

I can only see this as a good thing. If I want local search results, I'll add local qualifiers like "USA", "Texas", "Houston"

That was an odd one to read, being in Houston. I thought somehow you added wildcards that were auto filled with the users location, I then realized that I'm an idiot.

You could also do searches for yourself like "Stefan" and "Theard" and even type your password in like "* * * * * * * *".

A lot of JavaScript things have been buggy for me with encrypted.google.com as well. For example the Google timer cards and such often just won't start at all, while they'll work fine on the regular google.com.

It's a sad fact that regular google results are sometimes better than encrypted.google.com. It is like regular google knows what "I" want.

The difference isn't the encryption, but the fact that Google tracks your searches to give you "better" results.

I added bangs to google by defining custom search engines with a one or two letter prefix in chrome://settings/searchEngines

Now if I type "h my-search" into the omnibar, it goes to google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+my-search which gives me only Google search results from HN.

This is using google's algorithm (not the search bar built into whichever website like DDG) which is still the best, especially if you constrain it to one domain name. I also don't have to type the "!"

The prefix messes up google's text prediction. I guess no one from the chromium team is using this feature, since it would be trivial to fix.

That also works with bookmark keywords in Firefox. The setting is in each bookmark's properties; it takes variables (I leave it to the reader to look up the syntax).

Here are the ones I actually use.

w https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%s&btn... first result from wikipedia

h https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%...

r https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s reddit

y https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s youtube

m https://www.google.ca/maps/search/%s google maps

b https://builtwith.com/?q=%s add "b " to a url to find out what tech is being used

wo https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s wolfram alpha

i https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s google image search

g https://github.com/%s "g upspin/upspin" to jump to https://github.com/upspin/upspin.git

br https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formul... read homebrew formula

c https://caniuse.com/#search=%s

It's better to use the '!s' bang. Is like using '!g' but with more privacy because uses startpage.com

I didn't realize google allowed this kind of thing.

Then what's the difference between using !g and startpage.com ?

More bangs at https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I tried switching to DDG a few years ago, but I found myself using !ge more often than not, so I wasn't really sure what the point of using DDG was. For my needs, DDG's results are pretty mediocre. Which is a shame, becuase I'd rather support them over Google.

Your needs a few years ago, or your needs now? As benbenhu says, it has gotten a lot better. Lately I've found that when DDG doesn't have the thing I want and I stick the !g in, Google doesn't necessarily do any better, which implies that it's just a hard search.

I second that. I rarely use the !g bang (no need for that, DDG has the anwsers), but when I do I don't get anything more significant.

Would be interested to hear what search engines people here use. I feel the promise of DDG is the ability to match your search engine to your purpose. Maybe if you want to search for a particular code snippet you can use a search engine that is friendly to programming syntax. Or if you want more lateral results, you use a search engine with an unusual algorithm. But I haven't yet been able to find alternatives, if they exist.

https://yacy.net

The 'I'm feeling lucky' one is great.

'<Song name> !' or '<song name> youtube !' takes you right to it.

I'd love a feature that opens the first result on a search engine like wikipedia does by default. Biggest use case for me would be imdb but there would be others.

Well, lucky you!

DuckDuckGo has that by using a backslash, a space and a search term (\ bed intruder youtube) or an exclamation a space and the search term (although I believe the former is the official way now). I use it all the time, it's like a superpower.

I've been a happy ddg user for months now but never knew about this, thanks!

I'm tired of people mentioning !g. If you want to use google, just use google. Stop using duck duck go just to search google, and then say "but duck duck go is better" lo. no it isn't. clearly.

Yeah, if someone is just going to search Google all the time. If one is going to use DDG most of the time, but then pivots, it's worth noting. I use DDG to get to Wikipedia, Amazon, Google Images, and sometimes Google (for technical searches).

It's a way to wean yourself off of Google or quickly see results from a different perspective. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just an easy way out for people who don't trust ddg just yet.

That and its a Good way To help ddg (recording used search queries) and getting google results

It's completely valid to use that when you are searching for something local. Something that ddg shouldn't really do.

With DDG as my default search engine (Safari, macOS & iOS), I can (in the rare cases that I need to) easily and quickly search on google or startpage or other sites (by appending !g or !s in the search box).

If you're on Google as your default search engine, it's not so convenient to see other engine's results (plus you're being tracked all the time).

It's not about using duckduckgo to search with google. I use it when duckduckgo results aren't good enough, instead of typing everything in google again. I have been using it less frequently recently.

When I tried it years ago, I would search DDG first, then use !g if I didn't get what I wanted. I ended up using that a lot, so I switched back to Google.

Sounds like they have changed a lot since then, so I'll probably give it another shot.

If you want to use google, but don't want them to connect you to your search terms and connect you to their ecosystem and track you some more, then use DDG and !g.

Now that I've learned that !a works for amazon.com and duckduckgo.com gets affiliate revenue that way, then that's how I'll search amazon from now on. Need to boost up the underdog that cares about privacy, because google surely doesn't.

But then you can’t use bangs anymore. I think the idea is that Google is there if you need it while still retaining the benefit of using bangs. So, it’s the best of both worlds.

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