Hacker News Reader

!hn for hacker news !a for amazon !w for wikipedia !imdb for imdb !reddit for reddit !wa is the best for calculations and other weird stuff (ex: type in a date and find out what day of the week it was)

Bang patterns are awesome!

Tip for non-English speakers

!wen for English wikipedia if your default language is something else.

I use search keywords directly in my browser's address bar. Isn't going through ddg always going to be slower?

same. yes we save a few milliseconds with every query that we perform;)

Well, if your browser's set search engine is DDG, !bangs can be used in the address bar. They're just shortcuts to other search engines. For example, if you wanted to search for Matt Damon on IMDB, you'd just type "!imdb matt damon" in your address bar and it'll forward the "matt damon" query to IMDB's search.

More specifically, typing "!imdb matt damon" will simply forward you to the following link: https://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=matt%20damon

----

More examples:

!a soap => https://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywo...

!hn duckduckgo => https://hn.algolia.com/?query=duckduckgo&type=story&dateRang...

Too bad usually the general search engines are smarter than individual sites' search engines, I don't get how it's really useful than not having the bang.

> typing "!imdb matt damon" will simply forward you to the following link

In Safari, typing "imdb matt damon" and hitting the down arrow before enter gives me the same result. Do other browsers not have site search built-in? It will also pick up search fields on any site you browse you instead of requiring it to be added to some central repository.

And I use Spotlight for calculator and unit/currency conversions. Seems wasteful to roundtrip that kind of stuff online.

I don't think Firefox on Android supports this. On Desktop it's quite useful for when you want to search a site you don't have a shortcut for. Guessing the shortcut has usually worked for me.

Also, when your search didn't give you what you were looking for, you can just prepend e.g. !g to search on Google, which for me is slightly faster than to copy the query, go to the address bar, enter "g" and then paste.

Android Firefox supports both keywords for bookmarks (with %s substitution in URL) and bang searches on DDG from the address bar. I'm happy to discover this today :D

Yes, and it sends the data to ddg, but they have tons of keywords ready to use. I usually set my most used keywords directly and let ddg take care of the rest, best of both worlds.

Google's currency conversion also includes a chart:

https://www.google.com/search?q=10+cad+to+usd

Not seeing any passphrase generation though.

!wa Calories in a cubic lightyear of cheese

= 2.4*10^54 Cal

Interesting question: does a black hole initially formed of a cubic lightyear of cheese retain its calorific content?

I'm going to say no, because the black hole will be more dense than a neutron star, where chemical energy (and, more generally, chemistry) can't exist because protons and electrons fuse into neutrons.

The energy still exists, presumably, but claiming that's relevant would be like claiming a cheese at the top of a hill (potentially about to be rolled) has more calories.

In a previous life, I spent a lot of time backpacking, and half-jokingly made a point of stopping to eat/drink before bigger climbs. More fuel in the furnace, and less to haul up in the pack.

In that context, the cheese at the top of the hill really does have more calories or value or something along those lines.

The currency conversion seems to have improved. It used to require the currency and number in a specific order with specific spaces to work. Now it works with any order and spacing.

If you like DDG's bang commands, you might want to check out Riot.im - it supports autocomplete for DDG searches and bang commands (and as far as I'm aware is the only IM client to do so)

/ddg <query> to try it out

When it comes to password, you're better off using some offline tool.

Why? Because some high powered adversary is spying and decrypting all your internet traffic to find a passphrase you may or may not use in its entirety?

DDG should be fine to be trusted but you don't know what kind of code produced it.

You need to worry about where the produced password is stored, how random it is and you can't prove any of it.

Generally, you can't just decrypt your traffic... there are other attack vectors.

Our instant answers are open source. You can see the Perl used for the passphrase Goodie here: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/mas...

We’re not storing these generated phrases anywhere.

> When it comes to password, you're better off using some offline tool.

It can be useful for low risk scenarios.

(Ex: setting up a new netflix passphrase to share with a new partner)

I absolutely love those extensions. Another two I discovered by accident:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=colorpicker

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=calculator

I just hope the search result quality will improve over time as right now, I still use !g for about 10% of my searches.

Those are neat but basically intercept traffic to websites that could easily do that sort of thing. Maybe a Hacker News user made a color picker as a side project. It would be monopolistic behavior when done by major companies.

Not really.

Color picker is a native element of most browsers.

Calculator is a CompSci 101 project.

If you're counting on either for traffic, you need a better business model.

On the one hand I see the issue too, but on the other hand, it is very useful, and it looks like those tools are some kind of open source collaboration:

https://duck.co/ia/view/color_picker

I don't know who controls the contributions and decides what is going to be included in the final result, but so far it looks just fine to me. After all, they still present the normal search results below the tool.

> It would be monopolistic behavior when done by major companies

Right. And when done by non-monopolies, we call it "competition".

What if I made a color picker that competes with your other HN-person-color-picker? How does that work? If my color picker gets a search engine feature, am I unfairly intercepting traffic from DDG?

Probably said HN user should just make a better color picker then. One that provides something that others don't.

It's nice to protect the little guy but in this case.. it's just too much.

Google also has a calculator and a color picker. If you want to be mad at someone taking traffic that would be Google since they have 1000x the volume of ddg.

I have been using DDG on my laptop for a while, now. These are some great examples of what it can do that I never knew! Thanks for sharing. That said, I have regularly made use of !g when the results were absolutely horrid. Often, it is when I am looking for something frustratingly specific that is named frustratly generic. So while I understand DDG's results, Google (scarily) understands me and gives me exactly what I want even for those only-a-geek moments.

I have a colleague who uses DDG but they frequently have to use !g to find relevant stack-overflow answers. It's not clear whether DDG is simply ranking them lower than they ought to be or if it's just google's personalisation algorithm understanding which SO answers are relevant to our job / stack.

You can always open an incognito window to see if it's personalization affecting Googles results.

Surprisingly, I find the only substantial signal personalization uses is on your current location, and on results you have clicked before.

Search for 'pizza' for example, and the results will be all companies that are in your country, even if you search on Google.com.

Is there a way to verify that a search result set is “unpersonalized?” I wouldn’t put it past Google to be able to track you even into an incognito window.

Even the most paranoid don't think it's profitable for Google to track you through Tor, even if they've found some exploitable weakness. Try your search via Tor. Browser fingerprinting will get them little distinguishing information beyond what they get knowing you're coming from a Tor exit node.

DDG has a specific SO bang, so going via google is a clue that your colleague may be poor at basic searching and not understand the tools which they use.

That's rude and that's not it, it's the fact that google knows which SO questions are relevant.

If valid criticism is rude, we're all doomed here on HN. The parents point is valid. If you don't like it, that's fine, but rude it was not. Google doesn't know anything more than DDG, so you're just plain old wrong on that argument.

> your colleague may be poor at basic searching and not understand the tools which they use

I don't know about you, but this is pretty rude.

A babelfish for cron! It seems years too late in some ways, yet I have a funny feeling it will remain relevant for many years to come. Thank you.

For a while I committed to at least using DDG for sanitization/anonymisation of my Google searches with bangs:

  !g <query>

There is always value in trying other engines, but it's come such a long way since I've first started using it exclusively about four years ago.

How does that sanitize or anonymize? It's just a redirect, so they still get your cookies, customize, serve ads etc?

Try startpage.com to actually prevent google logging your information.

That's !s in DuckDuckGo, FWIW.

For "qr hello hn" https://www.google.de/search?q=qr+hello+hn shows the perfect result below while DDG does not have it:

> Show HN: QR codes - my mini project | Hacker News > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378735 > Mar 28, 2011 - Hello HN! Check out and comment on one of my mini projects: http://coderqr.com. It's a website for the QR-uninitiated crowd to quickly make QR ...

The irony is that currently both google and ddg show this very thread as the top result for that search. DDG also happens to include a qr code for “hello hn”.

You can also get random GUID: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=guid&ia=answer

Yes,there was a time when results were not good enough,these days I only use google if my query isn't direct or if a I need to search for individuals(due to how little they care about privacy,searching email addresses anf names is still ideal in google)

Ddg also has 'bangs'. For example !whois looks up a whois record,!b searches it in bing and !translate translates via google translate. They havr many more :-)

That's cool, I had no idea DDG had that many 'extensions' (or whatever they call them.) Is there a complete list somewhere?

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I meant the 'goodies' like the calculator.

JepZ posted this link above https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/tree/mas...

How about the Instant Answers list on DuckDuckGo Community? https://duck.co/ia

It has a filter for the goodies along with other good stuff.

DDG is a most important project! But I like GCHQ Cyberchef for this kind of thing, but also the node REPL or browser tools console REPL are good. Nice to have everything in one spot versus different tools based on search input.

For those like me, who didn't know: https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

Im always pleasantly surprised when I do a search expecting to have to click a site to get the answer, only to have ddg show me the results(a lot of time with a nice widget)

Try to search for "duckduckgo t-shirt" ;-)

Although I want to, it's hard to justify shipping price of 17$ over t-shirt price of 10$.

The biggest problem is that once everyone switches, it will get manipulated like Google and the cycle will repeat :(

The crontab parser is a thing of beauty

Nice, very tempted to give it a try. How do you find the ddg search experience on mobile?

I switched to it on Firefox mobile, works well enough for day to day stuff IMO. And if you need to quickly do a Google search you can use the !g bang operator as a prefix and it will redirect to google.

OK, that crontab one is pretty great.

the first and the last examples don't do anything for me :/

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