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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Bang searching is obsolete as far as I'm concerned. For any bang search I can think of, I'm confident that I can just search Google for the same keywords (without the bang) and still get the result I wanted. If I search for a movie title, I get IMDB in the top ~3 results, if I search for a product, I get Amazon results, etc.

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Which suggests you're happy with Google's filtered/targeted search results

Using bangs, you can skip a step. I suppose if you're using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" in your URL bar I suppose there is little difference. However, I find there is a bit more effort when you get outside the simple realm of products or celebs.

For example, if you want to search HN, you can just `!hn searchterms` rather than search "hnsearch searchterms", then click. As someone who searches a lot of different resources frequently, the little bit of time saved is helpful.

If DDG's privacy is not a selling point for someone, then I agree with you; bangs are hardly a reason to stick with DDG.

I suppose bangs save a user input step (since I have to search from the location bar then Tab + Enter to select a Google result), but I would gladly trade that for the additional mental steps of deciding which service to search and what the bang shortcut is for that service.

> I would gladly trade that for the additional mental steps of deciding which service to search and what the bang shortcut is for that service.

There are hardly any mental steps plural, if any mental step at all. Give it a try and see if there's a bang that doesn't make sense.

Examples:

!g - Google

!b - Bing

!gm - Google Maps (also !gmaps)

!bm - Bings Maps (also !bmaps or !bingmaps)

!d - Dictionary (also !dict and !dictionary)

!t - thesaurus (also !thesarus)

!gi - Google Images (also !gim)

!gh - GitHub (also !github)

!yt - YouTube (also !youtube)

!cpp - C++ reference from cplusplus.com

!hn - Hacker News Search

!aur - Arch Linux User Repo

!trulia - Trulia

!domain - domain name search

...etc

I essentially used bangs extensively many years ago (not through DDG; I set up custom keyword searches in Firefox), and I agree that it worked quite well. I now use raw Google searches, and I think Google is now good enough that it is not worth using bangs anymore (Google privacy issues notwithstanding).

Fair enough. :) As I said in my original post, if DDG's privacy is not a selling point for someone, then I agree with you; bangs are hardly a reason to stick with DDG.

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