Hacker News Reader

Comment by trinovantes | Hacker News Reader

Protip for Firefox users: you can create your own custom search engines for any website by simply creating a new bookmark of the form "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site:reddit.com" and set the bookmark keyword to whatever prefix you prefer e.g. "r". This config will let me search reddit by typing "r vuejs" my Firefox's address bar

View on HN

For DuckDuckGo users, you can just use a !bang. !r for searching on Reddit directly, !sr to go to a specific subreddit, !searchr for searching Reddit through DDG, and !greddit for searching Reddit through Google.

To see other Reddit options, !bangs Reddit.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=wt-wt&kp=-2&kn=1&kaj=m&kay=b&kv=m...

...my default/ basic DDG search. I ublock all the graphics and stuff, too.

What do the parameters do?

Here is a list of url params duckduckgo offers: https://duckduckgo.com/params

I'm too tired to match them to parents link, but should help a little bit at least :)

It's too bad they have !r go the the Reddit search page, which is famously bad.

I didn't know about !searchr, wish it was shorter. At least it's better than what I've been doing which is typing out site:reddit.com.

From further down this post, !ddgr works too.

Works in Chrome too.

I use the shortcut "rs" for https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site:reddit.com for searching reddit, and the shortcut "r" to go directly to the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/%s

How exactly did you do that?

Should be under Chrome Settings -> Search engine -> Manage search engines and site search -> Site search.

You can add your custom search with the %s placeholder, a shortcut to use in the address bar, and name.

Also available in Edge. I had to add Brave Search manually to set it as the default search.

Adding to the protip: there is https://mycroftproject.com that is full of premade custom search engines to save you the hassle of making them manually

Though there's some risk of it going away in an upcoming patch, you can also use JavaScript and do pretty much anything you want in a bookmarklet keyword, creating very powerful "advanced searches" for yourself. I have a few examples outlined here - https://river.me/blog/firefox-keep-bookmark-keywords/#bookma...

This is amazing. I've been using DDG mostly for the bangs and really wished there was a way to add custom bangs (I suggested them to DDG, but never got a response). This is just what i needed.

You can submit your own for consideration if you have a custom one in mind that might be helpful to others:

https://duckduckgo.com/newbang

That's what i meant by suggesting a bang. The bang was the equivalent of `!dictionary`, but in my native language. I guess not enough people here use DDG for it to be considered.

Great that you got to know it. "Mozilla keywords" is an age-old feature, probably from before firefox existed.

This isn’t really relevant anymore, but even Internet Explorer had that feature ("SearchUrl") since IE3 in 1996. While not well-known, it’s a must-have browser feature IMO.

You can do the same on chrome: right click on the url bar → manage search engines → set a keyword to the prefix you prefer and the url with %s for the search term in the same way.

On mobile I use global (OS-level) text abbreviations to auto-convert “sr” to “site:reddit.com”.

xSearch for Safari is great for this on Mac and iOS. I've made a bunch of custom !bang search engines on top of those supported by DuckDuckGo. It really speeds up research on various databases.

can you expand that further how to for the non-initiated.

I posted some screenshots on my website https://www.stephenli.ca/blocking-spam-websites-from-google-...

Basically Firefox substitutes the text of your query into the %s part of the bookmark URL

Doesn't work with Edge :(

Settings - "Manage search engines" - Add new one

Works very well with any site.

Awesome, I didn't know search engine settings had "keyword" feature. Thanks!

TIL! +100

Reply on news.ycombinator.com