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Comment by clubm8 | Hacker News Reader

I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now. It's not perfect but if you think carefully about your query it will work fine.

For me the killer feature is DDG's bang commands (https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

prepend "!w" for wikipedia, "!imdb" for movie trivia stuff, etc.

And if you don't find what you're looking for "!s" will search with Startpage (a site that proxies Google searches for you)

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Quick question: What's the advantage of bangs over adding a custom search engine to something like Firefox? In Firefox, we can right click any search bar and add a keyword for the search, so we could just type something like "w topic" to search Wikipedia for some topic. Anyway, maybe there's something I'm missing, but I am curious.

Wikipedia’s in-built search has historically been poorer than third-party search like Google. That is why people prefer to use a bang on DDG to show all relevant content on Wikipedia’s domain.

!w drops to Wikipedia's native search, not DDG's.

I use it precisely for this.

To me the advantage is that it works in any browser. So I don’t have to set up anything. It evens works on mobile.

I was thinking the same. I have a ton of custom search engines in Google Chrome.

Examples:

gi (google image search)

gl (google i'm feeling lucky search)

y (youtube)

wa (wolfram alpha)

i (imdb search)

w (wiki search)

m (google maps directions from my home address)

d (definition)

a (amazon)

f (stock/finance)

>I have a ton of custom search engines in Google Chrome.

Many of those have the exact same abreviation for their bang command. All of them should be available.

I prefer having the same search engine anywhere I use DDG versus only having custom search engines on machines I've customized.

There are some bangs that do not directly correspond to search boxes. For example, "!rfc 2616" expands into https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616

"Rfc 2616" typed into google works just as well and saves you a click.

Which click? DDG just redirects without even showing a SERP.

All of DDG's bangs already exist. I can just think up what the bang probably looks like and lo-and-behold: it works. Try !mdn, !tvtropes, !deb, !wayback...

I initially thought that there would be a high mental cost of switching from Google to DDG - but now that bangs have become muscle memory, using privacy-conscious DDG by default and then using !g if the results aren't helpful feels seamless.

Check out http://duckduckgoog.com -- which is google search with a sprinkling of DDG's bang commands

Curious how they made it to work (the same for startpage.com). Even my stationary workplace PC with static IP occasionally asks for captcha in google search. It says something like "we suspect you're a robot that abuses google search, back off". Sometimes solving series of 4 captchas is still not enough so I back off and beep twice.

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