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Comment by nonamegiven | Hacker News Reader

Easy to work around, no plugins or silliness require.

Get to Google via Duck Duck Go as your intermediary. Either from your search bar (if DDG is your default search engine), or directly from the DDG search page, search for

!g testing

!g tells DDG to send the query to google, and you land on the google results page (not DDG), at the following URL:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=testing

Even if you prefer google to DDG, you should make DDG your default search, and get to google via !g.

!gi searches google images. !am searches amazon. !imdb searches imdb, etc.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

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FYI, the plugins are to remove the redirects Google splices into the actual search results in an on-click handler. So an upvote for you for actually reading the article!

It's certainly nice that DDG knows the minimum required to do a google search, and 'ddg.gg !g testing' saves ~5 keystrokes on 'googl.com/#q=testing', though you do have to wait for the redirects/form submissions.

I am really interested in this, any tips for automation on chrome so I can use the omni bar and don't have to type !g ?

Click on the "Zebra Crossing" (that used to be the wrench/spanner :sigh:) icon > Settings > Search > Manage Search Engines

Scroll to the bottom and add "DDGooG" as Name, duckduckgo.com as the keyword and https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!g%20%s as the URL.

Hover over the URL and select "Make Default".

You are all set :)

That's a start, but it's a pretty roundabout way to do it.

You can just use https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s directly :)

...and make ones for Google Images, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and lots of other sites...

right, but that's different than what the GP to my post was asking, which was how to automate a regular google search with the clean URL without having to type !g every time.

To improve on nivla's answer, you can right click on almost any input field and select "Add to search bar". This will build the appropriate URL, based on the text field's name attribute and the action of the form which posts the field.

So if I had a form on "example.com" which had an action of "/do-search", and finally, a text input with a name of "query", then the URL it will add is:

http://example.com/do-search?query=%s

Saves you having to inspect the URL yourself to figure out the parameters.

Then you can go to the settings page nivla mentioned and make it the default search engine, so that any non-url's you enter into the omnibox are redirected to the %s in the URL above.

I just altered the Google query to only send a q= field. My search URIs look like this: https://www.google.nl/search?q=test.

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