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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

How are the bangs time savers? They drop you into the search interface of whatever site you're searching, which is fairly universally bad.

If I try a search like "Django connection pooling !r," I'm dropped into Reddit's search interface, and the top result is "My pool has water while not being conected to my water system" from /r/RimWorld.

This is not useful in the least.

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!a for an amazon search !e for ebay !m for Gmaps (without tracking, I believe)

Hundreds(?) more. At this point I prepend !<area of interest> to whatever search I'm doing and it takes me exactly where I needed on the first try.

And I'll add !hn for a quick HackerNews search :-)

It's not useful for exploratory querying, but it's very useful when I know what I want to find on a specific website.

For example, I want to see the latest videos uploaded on youtube by channel I like. I type in "!yt channelName". Or if I want to go to letterboxd to check out a movie's reviews. "!letterboxd movie"

It's not much of a timersaver, it's literally just saving the step of going to youtube.com and then searching. But I love tiny efficiencies like that

strange, i got https://www.reddit.com/search?q=Django%20connection%20poolin... when using that search. i think ddg bangs work best when set as the default search and you just type into search bar or right click on highlighted text then search. using vivaldi but chrome should be similar.

That's what the "site:" operator is for.

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