In Firefox you have a dedicated search bar (ctrl-k) which remembers your search across locations. So you search for "heisenbug oracle ipv6" press enter and are not immediately happy about the precision of your search.
So you press ctrl-k again and append "!so". Bang, your previous search is now applied to stack overflow and you have your answer straight at spot 1.
It's a very good flow. It will never work in retarded browsers who insist on removing the search bar though (like Chrome, Safari, IE).
In a deeply misguided act of Chromeism, Firefox was considering going in that direction too, but the outrage in the userbase hopefully caused them to never venture that line of thought again.
And copying the search text in the URL bar actually copies the link too, which is nice.
Uh huh. Because they'll lose their ability to tell if something is a search or a URL because of bang parsing, right?
Down side to that feature is when you search a random blog once and then two years later it's suggesting you search there again.
Both Firefox and Chrome use OpenSearch (http://www.opensearch.org/Home) to achieve this.
I can directly search Audible.com (a site I've never used before) with an intuitive !audible. Then I never have to think about this shortcut ever again, because it isn't saved in my browser somewhere.
Although pointless, it's fun to use my keyword "ddg" to use their bang syntax to search another site. Even if I already have that site as its own keyword.
ie:
There is no difference between me searching "y this searches youtube" and "ddg !y this also searches youtube" or having to actually visit ddg to search Youtube. There's no reason for me to not just use a feature already built into my browser.
>There's no reason for me to not just use a feature already built into my browser.
Plus I make ddg my default browser so I do just go to the address bar put `!yt cats` and get youtube cat videos.
!h searches Hoogle; I would prefer it to search Hacker News. To search Hacker News I have to use !hnsearch or !hn
!hn isn't much larger than !h but is still something I would prefer to set myself.
!m goes to Google Maps but I would prefer to use another map service. I could use !mapquest but would rather it just be !m
!sd goes to Slickdeals instead of Science Daily (which is !sciencedaily , talk about lengthy)
E:
I just compared my keywords and then searched the DDG Bang list for where I would be taken if I had used DDG instead of ones I set myself.
E:
>Plus I make ddg my default browser so I do just go to the address bar put `!yt cats` and get youtube cat videos.
I just type "y cats" and get youtube cat videos. ;)
>!hn isn't much larger than !h but is still something I would prefer to set myself.
>!m goes to Google Maps but I would prefer to use another map service. I could use !mapquest but would rather it just be !m
>!sd goes to Slickdeals instead of Science Daily (which is !sciencedaily , talk about lengthy)
It sounds like this is a prime use case for text shortcuts such as those built into OS X or Textexpander etc…
Just create a shortcut to transform '!h' to '!hn' or '!sd' to '!sciencedaily'.
>Good thing neither of us have to agree on what keywords to use.
Precisely! :)
What do they think that icon to the right of the tabs is? Just some bit of abstract art? :)
It's a lot like Pressing F11 without the issues that arise when using Full Screen browsing.
In the past that page would even discriminate searches made with DuckDuckGo. They recently redesigned the History page to fit their Material Design look.
I would hope that when I'm logged out, Chrome would not track me... And what about Chromium?
There's several more settings under Advanced Settings -> Privacy: "Learn more" links to https://support.google.com/chrome/?p=settings_privacy
-Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors
-Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar or the app launcher search box
-Prefetch resources to load pages more quickly
-Automatically report details of possible security incidents to Google
-Enable phishing and malware protection
-Use a web service to help resolve spelling errors
-Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google
All of these send info back to Google and can be used for tracking even when logged out. Not to mention the usual tracking in any browser. And this is just what they are up-front about.
See: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...
Prefetch makes local predictions and connects to any site, not Google in particular AFAIK.
The omnibar prediction service uses your default search engine, so Google is only involved if you've left it as such.
So if you take the obvious steps of changing your search engine and signing out of Google, that leaves only the navigation error service. As with safe browsing, this appears to send URLs to Google only if certain local conditions are met.
Yes.