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Comment by clubm8 | Hacker News Reader

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clubm8

They can also do cool stuff like currency conversion:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=10+cad+in+usd&atb=v123-2__&ia=curr...

And generate passphrases:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=7+word+passphrase&atb=v123-2__&ia=...

My killer app is the bang commands: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

!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)

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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.

!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.

Google's currency conversion also includes a chart:

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

Not seeing any passphrase generation though.

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)

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

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.

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