You can use keyword searches to get the !bang functionality directly in your browser for any search engine of your choice. There's no need to go through DuckDuckGo.
Except for that DuckDuckGo has hundreds of them already set up for you and the list is growing all the time: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html. I suppose you could curate the list of queries you use for yourself, but I find it easier to just use theirs.
Chrome automatically fills the list for the sites I actually visit. By default the keyword is the domain name, but I can change that to whatever I want, rather than memorizing DDG's idiosyncratic abbreviations.
I suppose if you're that lazy, but I've been curating them over the years (they're now synced using Firefox Sync), and because they're custom, I've got much shorter keywords and greater customization. 'w <term>' searches Wikipedia for something, while 'hn' just loads http://hackerne.ws
I don't think there are more than one or two times a day that I actually type in a full URL.
Likewise, on DDG, !w <term> searches wikipedia for something, while !hn <term> searches hnsearch for something. And I never had to configure anything. The best part about DDG is what someone mentioned earlier in the thread, the fact that so many sites are already in the list. If I've never searched Stack Overflow before, I can !so just based on a guess, and most of the time it is right.
Those are just two examples that I gave. Two examples of customization that aren't available that I have are 'wf' set to search Wikipedia for <search term>+ " (film)" and 'wtv' set to search Wikipedia for <search term>+ " (TV series)".
Right, but DDG provides a TON of them so you don't have to add them all manually. For example, I only need to search imdb like once ever 6 months or so, and I don't want to have to think about if I've already set up a browser search for it and go to the trouble of setting it up if not.
Then use a browser that supports open search, type "imdb <tab>" in your address bar and whatever you want to search for, no need to use "bang-notation". I rarely find websites that does not support this kind of feature. In order for it to work you have to have visited the website one time first, but after that it's pretty straight forward.
