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Comment by zumzumzum | Hacker News Reader

I am a long time DDG user, going on 4 years? I am just now starting to revert back to google more and more as I start to find their results lacking. The main problem I have with bangs is that my mental mode for searching is always going directly to the search string first. The friction of having to back out of that and insert a bang is too much. I would love to be able to add the bang at the end, as it is often then that I realize a particular search string would be better suited for google or some other service (but mostly google). I'll send them that suggestion.

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I've been adding the bang at the end of the string for years, and you can even add it in the middle:

    hacker news !g
    hacker news!g
    hacker !g news
    hacker!g news

all work.

I must be too dumb to use this feature, because everything I enter, including the examples from the page, gives me "No Results Found". (Seems like it works from the main page, though.)

The page linked here is a searchable list of what bangs exist, like !hn for hackernews.

Awesome, stellar tip.

You already can add the bang at the end. That is what I do usually. I am also finding the exact opposite, I have been getting much better results on DDG than Google lately. DDG is a search engine where as Google is a marketing platform.

This is all anecdotal, but something like 90% of my searches are fine in DDG. The rest are for highly specific searches in narrow fields where there just aren't many results at all, or where there's lots of results in another language e.g. Japanese. Google is better at filtering those out.

Ecosia[0] does this by using a hash sign at the end of the string instead, like "query #g" to google "query". I prefer that to DDG's bangs, but ecosia only has a couple of available options[1].

e: Apparently DDG can do this after all, so ecosia is actually less flexible since the search tag has to come at the end!

[0] ecosia.org

[1] https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657321-What-...

You can add bangs at the end afaik: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search%20!g

> I would love to be able to add the bang at the end

I've always been using it that way, and it works fine. Did you have a problem with using it at the end?

Good news. You can already put the band on the end.

I just went to DDG, and searched "cats !gi" and it did a google image search.

As for results - I find DDG has good results for most things. Sometimes it's better than google. Occasionally worse. So it's helpful to have the bang when i need it.

Actually, a bang can be inserted anywhere in your query if I understand properly your problem.

ex: "duckduck!g search" works as expected and go to google!

It is the same as site:domain.name in google and most other search engines. You can add that at the end or beginning of the search string.

you can also do:

!site <domain> <search string>

ex:

!site news.ycombinator.com duckduckgo

equates to:

site:news.ycombinator.com duckduckgo

Wow, that is so true! I never thought of it like that but it can be a bother when you realize the search is going to need google behind it.

I believe you can and have always been able to insert the bang anywhere in the query, as long as it has spaces between it and any words.

I’ve been using DDG for about a year and find it works great. I never end up using google.

Are there particular types of searches you have trouble with?

I just tested it, and bangs can be entered at the end of the search string.

"foo bar !g" searches Google for "foo bar"

"I would love to be able to add the bang at the end" That ability is already there. I use it all the time.

But you already can insert a bang at the end of the search string

You can do this e.g. 'search string !w'

you can already query with a bang at the end of the search string.

<something you want to search> !g

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