Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

So, I set Firefox to use DDG rather than Google as its default search engine a little while ago. And, reading this discussion, I realised that I'd like to see a complete list of "bang" searches DDG knows how to do.

Putting "duckduckgo bang" into DDG itself produces results that are ... not helpful. At any rate, nothing on the first page looks like it has any chance of answering the question.

But "!g duckduckgo bang" gives me https://duckduckgo.com/bang as the first hit (this is a high-level description of the bang feature), followed by https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html (which has the actual complete list right there), followed by someone's list of the 25 allegedly-most-useful DDG bangs. Most of the rest of the first-page hits are also informative -- they're things like Reddit and HN discussions of the bang features.

I think this is actually the clearest case I've seen since switching to DDG where Google had demonstrably more useful results. Which is kinda ironic.

I've asked that query. DDG showed a gray panel at the very top of the resut page, saying "Search thousands of sites directly from DuckDuckGo. Learn more about !bangs (or submit a new one!)"

Huh. It's there for me too, now I actually look. I guess I've learned to ignore banner-shaped things at the top of web pages.

[EDITED to add:] Actually, I seem to get it for "duckduckgo bangs" and for "bang duckduckgo" but not for "duckduckgo bang". But I'm not sure it's consistent from one search to the next. Anyway, I think the reason I didn't see it before is that it wasn't there, not that I'm banner-blind.

I actually do get it for "duckduckgo bang". Maybe they're hotfixing it, or maybe some self-learning algorithm decided that this was close enough to "duckduckgo bangs"? Shooting in the dark here.

Wow looking at that bang list (which is ridiculously huge) I finally understand why ddg is superior to google.

Google is doing it's best to take all the knobs and dials away making you reliant on it guessing your intention correctly. Which is pushing us into a monoculture (the ignoring of important keywords is getting more egregious)..

Anyway ddg is doing the complete opposite, I feel like I can actually find anything if I use it properly (but like with any other tool you need to learn how). I have it set as the default on some my machines but it's clear I haven't been using even half of it's potential.

I'm baffled, that's a list of thousands keywords that you won't ever be able to learn nor revisit to find what's new, and it makes you think it makes ddg superior to another product? What if it were 100 times longer, would it make it even more compelling?

Looking at the list makes me think that parsing of simple sentences is the way to go (like "translate xyz from swedish to russian") or the site:someurl filter from Google, not having a keyword per site or per language

The point of bangs is to make searching your favorite website really fast and easy. Find your favorite website/search and remember the bang for that, and you can search it from DDG with very few keystrokes (the biggies have fewer letters, so bangs end up roughly Huffman coded).

But you can also use site:wikipedia.org syntax in DDG to search any particular website, just like in Google.

So don't criticize bangs for not being good at everything "site:" allows you to do, they're different tools; use the right tool for the job. DDG gives you many of the same tools that Google gives, but adds many other tools.

And DDG has shown willingness to add more tools; just find/remember the (small) subset of these that helps you out, and someone else can find/remember those tools that help them out, and you each have good user experiences.

!bang is more helpful I think

!bang hacker news

!bang stack exchange

!bang hoogle

...

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