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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

Bang commands[0] really sealed DDG for me. I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic.

!g (search on Google) also makes it far easier to switch. Don’t like the results? Prefix !g and try again.

My other favorites:

  !sr [name of subreddit] - much faster than “reddit.com/r/[name]”
  !r - Reddit
  !w - Wikipedia
  !cache - get Google’s cache of a page
  !hn - HN Search
  !godoc - Search godoc.org for documentation on a Go package. Your favorite language is probably represented

EDIT: formatting

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang

View on HN

This is an offshoot discussion and I have nothing against DDG or bang commands -- just presenting another side of convenient searches.

> I know Firefox had install-your-own search plugins forever, but the total lack of friction of typing “!yt badgerbadgerbadger” to get specifically YouTube results was fantastic.

I find "use your own search" to be much less friction than going through DDG since it takes me right to results from the custom search, rather than having to redirect through DDG before going to the results. (Edited to add the following) I'm not going to lie and say that it doesn't make me a little paranoid to think of EVERY search I do going through one provider regardless of their current privacy stance.

I've used them since 2002ish in Opera, continued using them in Chrome, and now I use them in Firefox.

AFAIK you don't even need "install-your-own search plugins" -- just right-click on the search box on the site you want to search, and add keyword.

For example, I have "aj" for Amazon Japan and "au" for Amazon US, so I can just hit cmd-t for a new tab and type "au pretzels" directly in the address bar.

This has the advantage of letting you define your own, too.

There's a thing I wish FF had that Chrome has had for a long, long time (an older comment of mine):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20056174

re: ease of searching within sites and building that availability (of sites) up

I switched back to FF from Chrome a year ago and that's one of the things I miss the most. I really like FF and will continue to support them, but there were so many little conveniences Chrome got right that FF seems to completely ignore.

Yep, the simplicity of Chromes keyword-based search feature is so good, I have several setup which aren't even really searches at all, such as translate from detected language to English (tren Some sentence in other language).

You can of course do this in Firefox as well, but in Chrome -besides Chrome most of the time just adding them automatically- there's a simple preference pane where I can easily configure the three important parts; keyword, pretty title, and search URL with %s as the search token.

I wish Firefox would add this, it's a big holdover for me.

I don't understand the behavior your are talking about. I tried in Google Chrome and could not figure it out.

In Chrome's address bar, you type the name of a site (say reddit.com), then tab, then some keywords, and that does a google search for your keywords inside reddit.com?

On chrome://settings/searchEngines you can see all the search engines and their search queries listed. In the keyword column, you can also see the associated keyword. This means if you wanted to search in npmjs.com, then type npmjs.com and then a space in the omnibar. Ofcourse, if you wanted to make it shorter, you can edit the keyword in the same page to say `npm`, then you can search by using npm followed by a space or tab

I've used that in Firebird/Firefox for over ten years. If I remember correctly it's configured by adding a keyword to a bookmark and adding a placeholder within the bookmark URI.

google had this capability for a long time, if you want to search for a result in a specific site, you need to type in the search site:www.reddit.com. i.e: " some error site:www.stackoverflow.com"

Exactly. I like to do this for both speed and privacy.

You can even use DDG bangs as your keywords. I do this for the bangs that I use most frequently (e.g. !w) for both reduced latency and increased privacy. This means I keep the muscle memory for using bangs on other folks machines, but I still get improved privacy and speed on devices that have my bookmarks synced.

The advantage to me is that I sometimes use a new browser and lose these settings. Also for defining my own, I seriously haven't found a search that isn't already in DDG. Maybe back in the old days when you wanted a search box from a specific forum (though the site: operator usually works better imvho).

I was totally with you on Opera in 2002, however :) All the way until they dumped their own engine and lost many of their unique features. It was still kinda fun to use last time I installed it though. But it also feels just like Chromium with some stuff tacked on.

Wow, thanks for sharing. I didn't knew about the add your own keyword functionality. Pretty nice!

Wait if I browse Amazon Japan will I find like, different and better things?

Different things, definitely.

Better? Depends on what you need!

I use Amazon Japan because I live here, though.

Maybe yes. But also way more expensive shipping :-)

JFYI, there's no need to install anything. Focus on a search field on (almost any) website, open the context menu, and "Add a keyword for this search". Put a letter or two into the "keyword" input. Profit.

Mozilla is deprecating OpenSearch support in Firefox[1] at some point. The OpenSearch standard is what provides this functionality.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/10/15/search-engine-add...

That article is only about OpenSearch addons from addons.mozilla.org. While I don't see a good reason to remove them, I also don't see a good reason to keep them. The OpenSearch discovery feature is staying and I haven't heard of any efforts to remove it. Or am I missing something?

That article is about add-ons from AMO that use the OpenSearch provider API, but it mentions eventually deprecating OpenSearch from Firefox, too. It's been touched upon on HN in the past[1].

However, I was wrong about OpenSearch providing the functionality that the "Add keyword for this search" bookmark feature implements. That feature is completely independent from OpenSearch and isn't going anyway.

"Add keyword for this search" via bookmarks are not going anywhere in Firefox as far as I can tell. This was a false alarm on my part.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21291131

What the fuck.. Mozilla is really hell bent in this war on their own users aren't they?

Does this mean I'll have to install an extension to replace each search keyword I have? That would be dozens of extensions, many of them for obscure niche websites.

Take a look at my response to my original post, I was wrong about keyword searches via bookmarks being deprecated. OpenSearch doesn't provide that functionality.

No need for an extension, you can still set bookmarks that search with keywords.

It just won’t automatically create the URL pattern the site suggests.

Not quite the same as entering "red" and hitting tab in order to search reddit, for example.

That still means I have to set this all up for all the sites I want, which is a hassle. The convenient thing about ddg is that it comes with a large number already setup out of the box.

As someone hearing about this for the first time, are custom searches portable? Do they sync with Firefox Sync? Do they work on Firefox for Android?

You can manually create custom searches as regular bookmarks with a keyword so they should sync.

I'd also like to know this. Been using Firefox mobile but chrome on PC and syncing custom search operators could be what gets me to switch back to FF on PC

> Do they sync with Firefox Sync?

No.

> Do they work on Firefox for Android?

Yes.

I think akvadrako above[1] has it right, they appeared on my mobile phone on sync, as they are bookmarks.

Again, I think, I'm not sure ;)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22115461

There are two things being confused here.

I was thinking about OpenSearch custom search engines (being deprecated apparently as another comment notes, these appear on desktop as icons under the search input field "This time search with" and similarly in Android as icons above the on-screen keyboard. These definitely don't sync.

The other thing are bookmarks with the "keyword" property set. These do indeed sync, like other bookmarks.

For me, the killer feature is DDG's solid keyboard navigation of search results. Google's never worked properly and they eventually removed it.

It did work very well for me, at least for a typical search. Ctrl+T, <type search in already focused textbox>, Enter, Down arrow a few times, Enter.

There is a lot of value to me in this, the user, but actually negative to google: you can't really justify inserting ads into keyboard navigation, can you.

and "copy link" actually works as it should on DDG - it does not become a google link.

I just discovered that ' [single quote/apostrophe] opens the selected result (from navigating up/down using j/k or arrow keys) in a new tab.

I use Vimium: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...

If someone is using the duck for privacy, I should hope they're not using Google's Chrome and Chrome store.

Vimium also works in FF. I am using it right now.

I'm speaking 3 languages and learning a 4th; this is really a blessing.

   !wen - English Wikipedia
   !wpl - Polish
   !wde - German
   etc.

You can also use the bang command at the end of your query.... Just learned this myself recently and makes changing your search engine quickly if you don't like the results

And you can also write bangs "backwards", i.e. `w!` instead of `!w`. This may not seem like a big deal until you've tried to write `foo !w` on Android and had it "corrected" to `foo! w`.

You can use the bang anywhere in the qurey.

I didn't know this, thank you.

Just an FYI for other, you can also suffix your search with this, so if you type it all out and decide you need to hit up your !g fallback, it still works at the end.

Another FYI, it doesn't actually matter where you put it. As long as there's a space behind the g it works.

I usually add bangs in the end of the string, since it makes editing and removing them easier if needed.

Longtime user did not know could do this; cheers.

Yes, you can actually put them anywhere in the string.

I discovered it by experimenting :)

BTW, you can use !w<ISO country code> to search for different language wikipedia, eg

  !wde aldi 
  !wes la casa de papel

This, with the clean design, are the only reasons I switched.

It's especially awesome with all programming related bangs for quick documentation. Oh, and just `!` for 'I'm feeling ducky'.

This is great for when I can't remember the exact domain name, and whether it's .org or .net or whatever. e.g. `! kotlin` takes me straight to https://kotlinlang.org/.

Someone on that dev board is old school. 90s IRC days old school.

While I understand the nostalgia, I think this convention has carried into "today" in Games too, like "!kick bots". Maybe they're gamers. ;)

Whoever first implemented those bots ...

I discovered these when I was trying to learn about different bash shortcuts. I thought it was a bug. Filed a report and everything.

It is possible to setup those as the "keyword" for the search engines in the manage search engines setting in Chrome. I dislike having to type '!', so I just set it up so 'g' is the keyword for google, and so a google search is 'g keywords' from the address bar. It is a decent amount faster because there is no redirect.

chrome let's you type the first few characters of a page, and then press tab to enter a search term for that page..

e.g. y tab will let you search youtube, which is even a little faster than the DDG bangs for some sites.., but certainly acccompanied by unwanted privacy defaults.. not sure how much of it you can turn off and still use the feature..

This. I'll never understand the hype about bangs when you can do the same by typing a letter and tab your browser. en. <tab> to search on English Wikipedia, etc. Having to do ! seems awkward, plus you have to remember the letters.

Back in the day, say 15 years ago, there were dedicated search bars and prefix searches were the only option. I've hated the idea of separate search bar, so I used the prefix way after it was necessary even for the default search engine. Every browser ever that I can remember had supported them out of the box.

sadly they removed scihub's bang

See? That's why it's dangerous to rely on some random third party for your search shortcuts.

True, but in sci-hub's case it's even dangerous to rely on the first-party to work reliably.

I just found out about !r the other day and had no idea !hn existed. This is excellent news.

I just wanted to point out that you can also do this on Google, just use the `site:` prefix. Example: `site:youtube.com badger`. Obviously the bang prefix you're referencing are shorter, but this is nothing new.

Edit: Ah, I misunderstood. The bang prefix will send you over to the search results page of the site in question. That's pretty neat.

This is not correct. DDG's bangs delegate to each site's search engine.

Google's site: prefix makes Google show results it has from that site. A DDG bang will redirect you to the site's own search results.

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