Hacker News Reader

Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

except that DDG has them all set up already. if you want them in firefox, you have to set them up yourself.

I don't see how setting them up is a big deal. Once you know how to do it, you'll use it for just about everything. I'm at the point now where 99% of the websites I visit are accessed via either a keyword search or keyword bookmark (i.e., 'hn' for http://hackerne.ws/). Combined with Pentadactyl (Vim emulator) in Firefox, I browse so fast that the only thing that holds me back is how dog-slow the Firefox UI gets unless you regularly create a new profile and "start fresh" every couple of months. But I try to keep all my stuff in the cloud (bookmarks in Xmarks, passwords in LastPass) so that this is fairly painless.

Besides, it eliminates two keystrokes. Considering the amount of times I look up something on Wikipedia every day, I'd say that it pays itself back in spades.

My impression is that Google also always returns wikipedia when you have "wiki" as a search term. Only an extra two characters.

That's not the same thing as the '!w' feature on DDG or the 'w' keyword bookmark. Once you Google 'wiki <search>', you have to click on the first link. Unless you set up an IFL search, in which case you might as well set up a Wikipedia search.

Good point, although I virtually always am looking for a specific article on wikipedia and not searching the site.

Which is exactly what my keyword search does. For example, if I type 'w hacker news' into my location bar, I'm instantly redirected to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_news

When you set up IFL search, you can use it for wiki, imdb, documentation, projects' homepages and dozens of other sites that you know you will find in the first spot. I have IFL as my default (w/o keyword) search. When I'm not so sure I just use keyword search (g for google and few others (but not wiki or imdb)).

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