
Search Bangs - brudgers
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
======
buckbova
ddg is my default and this is the killer feature for me.

I type in "houston !gmaps" and right to google maps focused on Houston. I copy
paste "[error] !so" and get relevant stack overflow search, "[actor] !imdb"
etc.

~~~
amelius
But if you type "dragon book amazon" into Google, it will do exactly what was
intended. No bangs needed.

To make matters worse, if I type "dragon book" into the Amazon search bar
directly, I'm getting the wrong results.

(Both searches done from a fresh incognito tab.)

~~~
zxcvcxz
How do you know what was intended? Amazon is more than just a domain name.

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mdturnerphys
I have keyword searches [1] set up in Firefox for the sites I want quick
access to. It does the same thing, but is browser-based.

[1] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-
address...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-bar)

~~~
bhrgunatha
I use ddg, but I also have a bunch of keyword searches in firefox too (about
25) because they've been supported for longer than ddg and I seem to spend
more time in the URL bar than the search box. It was a joy to find the keyword
search extension for firefox [1] that provides a context menu and let's you
highlight text on a page and choose from one of your keyword searches from a
ciontext menu.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keyword-
bookm...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keyword-bookmarks/)

------
JasonSage
I use bangs very frequently and quite like them.

Probably the ones I use most are !gh to search github or !npm to search npm
(although npmsearch.com is often more useful).

One thing I wish I could do was combine the first-result bang (!) with other
bangs (like !gh). That would translate into "take me to the first result on
github for these search terms..."

~~~
tagawa
Good idea but I think that wouldn't be practically possible. We redirect you
to third-party sites but we don't know what the first results on those sites
are.

Technically I suppose it's possible to "scrape ahead" and get the top result
in the background before redirecting the user, but some sites change search
results based on your profile/behaviour so it could be inaccurate. It may also
be against those sites' terms and conditions.

~~~
losingkeys
What about sort of appending site:GitHub.com and going to the first result
there? Not always the first result you'd see, but it might work okay.

~~~
tagawa
Now that's an interesting idea. It's already possible using the `\\` trigger,
e.g.:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=\getusermedia+site%3Astackoverflow...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=\\getusermedia+site%3Astackoverflow.com)

but a short syntax such as `\\!so getusermedia` is a potential alternative.
I'll suggest it to the team.

~~~
arm
Ah, now I see why that was happening to me in the past. I was doing a search
to find out about a command in some program that began with a backslash (a
search query like: \COMMANDNAME), and was wondering why I kept being
redirected to some random website.

~~~
tagawa
Ahem, sorry about that! That's our "I'm feeling ducky" trigger:
[https://duck.co/help/results/syntax](https://duck.co/help/results/syntax)

------
cisstrd
Is there a really good in-depth up-to-date comparison somewhere between
duckduckgo and google?

For example: I don't see any advantage in those search bangs, simply searching
"shoes amazon" on google will do the job, or if I really want to search a
specific site one can easily do "shoes site: amazon.com", and considering all
the other things google can do...

duckduckgo might do some of those things, some of those even well, but I don't
know, therefore the question about a detailed comparison... in google:

search literally by using quotation marks "to be or not to be", show weather,
stocks, definitions, times, calculate anything, you can even do stuff like
"notebook 200$..300$" which searches in that specific price range, currency
and number conversion, exclude some search terms, flight information and lots
more... whenever I read of something about supposedly awesome duckduckgo-
features, it seems like the author(s) don't know a lot about google's
capabilities... or I guess don't mention it on purpose. Many don't know about
google's capabilities I guess, and then they might go "look what duckduckgo
can do", ehm "google has been capable of that for x years"...

and by the way: last I checked google was immensely superior in search term
results (even without the bubbling effect)

~~~
resu_nimda
_simply searching "shoes amazon" will do the job, or if I really want to
search a specific site one can easily do "shoes site: amazon.com"_

The search bangs take you directly to the search implementation of the site in
question. Sometimes this is preferred to a Google search. If you try "!amazon
shoes" on DDG and "amazon shoes" on Google, you can see the difference.
Basically, in any case where you would type something into a site's search box
(instead of Google's), it saves you a click or from having to navigate to that
site first.

~~~
cisstrd
Oh I see... just tried it, k, can see why some like that feature, I actually
think it's something a search engine isn't supposed to do, but ok, thanks for
the hint :)

~~~
metasean
@neurobuddha has also been blogging about specific !bangs which is even more
enlightening -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11773901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11773901)
(his post is currently buried below, but he totally deserves all the karma!)

------
wlkr
I was pleased to discover the Qwant[0] search engine recently and have found
its results to be a significant improvement over those provided by DuckDuckGo.
It also has some support for bangs (but the bang must be at the start of the
query). I've come to rely a lot on bangs and would love to see this further
supported; coincidentally I submitted feedback to them about this earlier
today.

[0] [https://www.qwant.com](https://www.qwant.com)

------
58028641
This has been around for years

~~~
brudgers
It was even discussed on HN four years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4260964](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4260964)

------
cpeterso
I've run into a few bangs that no longer work. I tried reporting the broken
bangs on Twitter and the DDG bug reporter, but I received no reply and they're
still broken.

I'm surprised DDG doesn't have automated monitoring of every bang API they
use. They should have daily or hourly health check queries to confirm valid
HTTP responses or even expected search results.

~~~
tagawa
Hi. Do you have a list of the bangs that don't work for you? I can forward
them to be looked into.

~~~
cpeterso
Thanks!

* !d20srd (D&D reference search) and its alias !d20 are 404. There is also !srd, which searches the same site but actually works. These bangs should be merged.

* !zillow (real estate search for an address) will show the neighborhood the address is in, but not the exact match. Search for the same, pre-populated address on the site shows the exact match. This is a problem with the way DDG is encoding of the search terms.

* FIXED: !blekko still existed (and was broken) even though the service had been shut down after the company was acquired by IBM.

~~~
tagawa
Thanks for the details. I've reported the d20 ones - there was also !d&d that
should go to the same site.

For Zillow, it seems appending "_rb" to the end of the address makes it work
so I've requested that. We do get hundreds of !bang suggestions and updates
though, so it make take a little while.

------
puranjay
Okay, this is pretty damn neat.

I just searched for "!a laptops" and was sent straight to Amazon's laptop
search page.

------
joslin01
I prefer Google's built into Chrome where you start typing (e.g.) amaz then
let it autocomplete then press <tab> then search away. Easier than remembering
bangs and gets me a headstart on somewhere I know I'm already going (youtube
is another good one)

------
agumonkey
!gview is one of my favorite, quick pdf reader when the embedded ones fail to
render correctly.

------
oldgun
Good. Hat off to the Duckduckgo team. It's my major search engine now.

------
kevindeasis
This is pretty cool. I'll start using DDG specifically for this feature as I
can never remember the full path for search queries on different sites that I
go to

------
cheez
My most used bangs: ! (go to the first result) and !g (perform search on
Google). Occasionally, I'll use !w (Wikipedia).

They really make it easy to get to where you wanted to go.

~~~
Steko
!gis (google image) and !gri (reverse image) are both quite useful.

~~~
aibara
A shorter bang to search google images: !i

~~~
Steko
Thank you! I had assumed !i was ddg images for some reason.

------
icen
I use `!rustn` because it's more convenient than actually loading my local
copy of the rust documentation.

------
joejayanth
Isn't this an old feature in DDG. I have used this two years back. Even added
a !sulekha

------
beardog
!w for wikipedia is my favorite.

------
hemant19cse
It's cool but I believe it will be better to have even autosuggest site
specific. I mean if I search for !a shoes it should suggest me content from
Amazon not from anywhere else.

------
aptwebapps
Pretty neat. I was curious how a general search would work on a travel site
but '!kayak iah' or '!kayak houston' just dumps me on kayak.com after a few
redirects.

------
746F7475
Wish Google would support this. Then again I've already become accustomed to
writing !g at the end of all my search queries.

I love bangs, but DDG's results are still very subpar

~~~
wlkr
Sorry for the meta post but I don't understand why your comment was down
voted. It seems a few people in this thread have been down voting any
criticism of DDG, which is a misuse of the feature.

------
friendly_chap
So what is the difference between this and google's "site:"? The latter works
for any site, there is no need for a custom list of 8000 sites.

~~~
robenkleene
Google `site:wikipedia.org` search (which also works in DuckDuckGo) uses
Google's interface and index, i.e., you get a Google search results page. With
Search Bangs, you get a search results page using that uses a websites own
engine, e.g., it's filling out a search term with a template like
`[http://wikipedia.org/?search=*`](http://wikipedia.org/?search=*`).

This is actually very old idea that used to be implemented in various browsers
and extensions. Here's a support page for Fireboxes implementation, which
might still work[1]. Personally, I do this on OS X with LaunchBar Search
Templates[2], which is nice because it's browser agnostic.

[1]: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-
address...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-bar)

[2]:
[https://www.obdev.at/resources/launchbar/help/SearchTemplate...](https://www.obdev.at/resources/launchbar/help/SearchTemplates.html)

------
vincentleeuwen
I would love a native mac client for this.

~~~
ChristianBundy
Like a browser? I'm confused at what else it could be.

------
esc-ape
There comes me with system wide keywords self customized on Alfred. Best
productivity tip you can get

------
neurobuddha
Duck Go !Bang: [http://duckgobang.com](http://duckgobang.com) is a blog that
tests bangs (some listed on Duck Duck Go are broken) and showcases the most
useful ones.

Bangs are such a cool search hack, I wonder why more people don't use it.

