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Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

DDG has thousands of premade !bang shortcuts though. You don't have to spend any time creating unique search aliases for every one of your browsers. You (and anyone else) can directly search wikipedia with a quick !w from at DDG from any browser anywhere.

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Chrome automatically creates these for me, though. Start typing imdb.com, once it starts autocompleting, hit tab, then type whatever I want to search. I only have to go search there once. I've been using firefox and DDG lately and I really miss this.

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.

Firefox supports something similar, if you for example visit IMDb you can add their search via the Firefox search box and then add a keyword of your choice to use the search in the address bar.

Both Firefox and Chrome use OpenSearch (http://www.opensearch.org/Home) to achieve this.

That sounds a lot like you're still creating each one yourself. Just because Chrome is suggesting that you might want to create a search shortcut, doesn't mean you're still making individual shortcuts by hand.

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.

If you delete the suggestion by hitting Shift-Delete while it's highlighted.

Thousands of premade !bangs that I would have to memorize, rather than create myself (which makes memorization much easier)

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.

You can create them yourself in Firefox if you want. See http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.html

Which is exactly what I explained I use (and why I would use them), but thank you. :)

>There's no reason for me to not just use a feature already built into my browser.

o.o it's intuitive imo. !g - google, !yf - yahoo finance, !cb - crunchbase, !news - google news, !yt - youtube. Sometimes I just try an abbreviation that makes sense and lo I'm correct.

Plus I make ddg my default browser so I do just go to the address bar put `!yt cats` and get youtube cat videos.

Sometimes it's about wanting a trivially shorter keyword.

!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)

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.

>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. ;)

>!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)

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'.

Or it's a prime reason to use keywords, a functionality built into modern browsers, such that I only need to type "sd" to search Science Daily.

http://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html

Thank you for singing the praises of bookmark keywords, which are apparently a long-lost and forgotten feature to many people. I love all of mine, and it sounds like you've created a great library of your own. Good thing neither of us have to agree on what keywords to use.

I blow some people's minds when I tell them about tab groups (ctrl+shift+e) in Firefox.

>Good thing neither of us have to agree on what keywords to use.

Precisely! :)

> I blow some people's minds when I tell them about tab groups (ctrl+shift+e) in Firefox.

What do they think that icon to the right of the tabs is? Just some bit of abstract art? :)

I have a heavily customized userChrome.css - none of Firefox's Chrome UI is exposed to me. The only UI I see are the few context menu options I left and tab groups (if you can consider that FF UI)

It's a lot like Pressing F11 without the issues that arise when using Full Screen browsing.

There's some good stuff in there. If you're searching for Perl documentation !mcpan will lead you directly to a MetaCPAN.org search page. "!mcpan Plack" is a good example.

It also helps that even if you don't know the shorthand that, say, !py3 does a search of the python3 documentation, almost always you can type out the full name to do the search, e.g. !python3.

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