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Comment by pkamb | Hacker News Reader

So these all just directly search for that term on the (usually substandard) internal website search box?

I don't get the appeal. I want the bang to show a good/filtered SERP, not load some other site directly. (similar to a `site:x` search on Google I guess.)

What I'd really like to use is a search engine that had custom ranking of domains. I'd heavily weigh it to only show Stack Exchange, Reddit, and forum posts.

Or a `!discussions` bang operator that filtered DDG results into that set.

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> I don't get the appeal.

Bangs are nice as a quick shortcut to specialized search engines like etymology online, google image search, wikipedia, or whatever.

You can set up your browser to do this (some keyword changes the search), but it's convenient that DDG already has it built in, so the only setup needs to be switching your default search engine.

I don't know why anyone would ever use DDG's bangs feature if it wasn't their default search engine. That's just a weird extra step.

Personally I use !yt (YouTube), !py3 (Python 3 docs), and !w (Wikipedia) very often, and !g (Google) sometimes.

These, plus !gm and !gi (for Googles Maps, and Images respectively) feature often in my use.

!m is Google Maps as well.

I've always been in the "I don't get it" boat with DDG bang operators. When I last tried switching it to my default search engine, I felt like any time I needed to search DDG for "!{bang} {query}" I could have just searched Google for "{query}" and gotten the result I was looking for. In many cases, Google will give even better results for siteX than siteX's own search, because Google is likely to correct for things like common spelling errors or word substitutions.

Granted, I haven't given DDG an earnest try in a couple of years, so the DDG non-bang search results may have gotten better, but the fact that their bangs are still heavily touted as a killer feature doesn't give me much faith.

I would call my use of bangs getting to a specific page on another site rather that searching another site. For instance, I get a lot of use out of the wolfram alpha bang, !wa, in those uses I'm not searching as much as I'm inputting a calculation for wolfram alpha to perform and the bang let's me skip a step by typing "!wa {quety/calculation}" into my address bar. Similarly, if ddg is your default search engine, you can lookup a url on archive.is just by prepending it with "!archiveis " in the address bar.

I have a similar use case with wordreference. I type '!wr wordtodefine' to get the definition of a word.

On Google I just search for "define wordtodefine" (which isn't must longer and might even be faster to type) or even just "wordtodefine" (Google seems to be pretty good at knowing whether a single-word search is likely to be looking for the definition).

A more common pattern for me is:

foo

Didn't get a good result

   foo !bar

With more specialized or different search engine (foo was already in my browser search bar, so adding !bar is easy).

Or simply

   foo !w

If I already know I'm searching in Wikipedia or whatever else specific. I think this feature is very neat.

The most obvious reason why you'd use DDG is for the privacy aspects and the bang operators make it super easy to quickly use Google for those times you need it which limits the amount of information they have.

The appeal is I can just try it without going to a site just to search. I want to search Target, I try !target. I want to search IMDB, I give !imdb a try. Usually it just works. Straight to the results. I hear you on the domain thing, but nothing springs to mind.

I use boardreader.com when I'm searching discussion boards. Maybe there's a bang for boardreader?

edit: Actually there is !brd

I use `!rust` all the time when I just want to pull up the rust docs quickly, since their search is much more effective when I just want to know about the API for a File or something, though I don't get much more value out of them than that.

And I've just learned I can use `!posix` to search the open group, which I'll probably use whenever I get upset with macOS's man pages again.

there is a nice plugin for rust https://rust.extension.sh/

not affiliated

I agree for many many sites, but do sometimes find it useful - specifically when you know exactly what you want from a particular site, but don't know the URL. Example: !deb for debian package information.

This is niche, but honestly I search for a lot of magic cards. I get a lot of use out of `!mtg`

That's a good example where I get zero results if I misspell the search term:

https://scryfall.com/search?q=black%20lotuss

Whereas I Google or Duck for "mtg black lotuss" I'll almost certainly get the correct results. I feel like I'd just get frustrated with the much worse text parsing of each site's search field.

Although it is interesting that this "Scryfall" site that owns "!mtg" isn't on the first SERP for Google or DDG.

You're right, but everytime I'm searching for magic cards I want to see them in scryfall. It gives you so much more information about the card that I'm okay with having to fix a typo

Being able to see price, reprints, legality, etc is great

Also, the best part about scryfall is it's searching paramaters. If I want to see the most expensive red creature cards currently legal in standard, I can do `!mtg color:r sort:usd legal:standard type:creature` and it's right there

It's made building decks so much easier for me with these easy text searches, as someone who loves being able to do things with a keyboard rather than selecting these parameters using a mouse on something like Gatherer

https://scryfall.com/docs/syntax

The low ranking of Scryfall results is actually why I search this way. Couldn't agree with stnmtn more.

Well, the appeal is that you can set your searchbox for DDG, and easily search all those others site when you want, no need to load search pages or change search providers.

And it's appealing to me, so I do that. Most people won't agree, most people don't even mess with search providers, but it's doesn't harm them either.

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