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Comment by fowlie | Hacker News Reader

After using the duck for a couple of years, I have become better at two things:

- Reading man pages or official documentation sites before opening a search engine

- Thinking of more precise search keywords, as I got used to duck not helping me as much as google

Along these lines I use ddg’s bangs for the same benefit. So many searches for Python help are filled with very shallow intros on tutorial sites of varying quality with the official docs rarely the first result.

Now I just prefix my query with !py and I’m immediately taken to the docs.

Brave Search supports !bangs ;)

That’s good to know!

For clarity, I wasn’t trying to say DDG is better than Brave, rather agreeing with the parent that there are smarter tools for gathering information rather than relying solely on a search engine.

Indeed, including nearly all of DDG's !bangs :) We also add in some others, such as !so for StackOverflow, !gh for GitHub, and !mdn for the Mozilla Developer Network.

Those are also in DDG.

Wouldn't surprise me; DDG has an impressive list of !bangs (more than 13K, IIRC). Thanks for the clarification!

And is there any list of all available bangs + also do we have an ability to add new ones?

Tip it lacks keyboard shortcuts to navigate search results (up/down, enter).

Arrow and PgUp/Dn keys scroll the page, as per standard Web UI. Tab key jumps from one link to the next, also as per standard Web UI. Maybe they changed that between our comments.

That works horribly on the results page, around 10 tabs to get to the first result.

also: considering how far out in the long tail of search terms my query is, before choosing to go with the !g bang out of the gate.

Google I find is still better for topics that are more idiosyncratic. But the bang syntax makes DDG a natural choice as default because many times I'll want to go directly to a specific domain search, e.g. !r or !nyt

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