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Comment by zzyzxd | Hacker News Reader

The frustration I am talking about is:

Check query result -> realize the result is bad -> scroll back to the search bar -> place cursor at the beginning of the query -> enter "!g" -> redirect to Google.com

It is not too bad on desktop, but doing it once on a smartphone is more than enough to push me to switch back to Google.

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The !g can be almost anywhere in the query, it just can't be followed by non-whitespace or prefixed by special signs.

This is what I wanted to say. It's a life saver on mobile especially. Just append !g to the query (or !gi for google images, !gm for maps, etc)

Personally I find it pretty predictable which queries duck duck go will fail on. Basically very niche ones.

So I just prepend based on what I'm searching for to begin with instead of after a failure. But I've also been using duckduckgo as my default for over a decade so I've gotten used to it.

If you use Tridactyl, you can quickly jump to the search bar with “gi”. That's what I do.

you can easily create a command for it (and bind to key(s)):

  command ddgGoogleBang composite js (new URLSearchParams(window.location.search)).get('q') + ' !g' | urlmodify_js -q q | open

I'm amazed that DDG/Brave don't understand that typing something immediately after a "!" on a smartphone is annoying and difficult. DDG only supports "!" after the character for a small subset of bangs. Thankfully "g!" is one of them, but it's immensely easier to type on smartphone.

most browsers support <c-l> to hop the cursor to the url bar for searches or url entries

    / <c-e> !g <enter>

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