7 ms·

DuckDuckGo's bang

107 points by tmlee 8y ago

zumzumzum 8y ago
I am a long time DDG user, going on 4 years? I am just now starting to revert back to google more and more as I start to find their results lacking. The main problem I have with bangs is that my mental mode for searching is always going directly to the search string first. The friction of having to back out of that and insert a bang is too much. I would love to be able to add the bang at the end, as it is often then that I realize a particular search string would be better suited for google or some other service (but mostly google). I'll send them that suggestion.
- 0942v8653 8y ago
  I've been adding the bang at the end of the string for years, and you can even add it in the middle: hacker news !g hacker news!g hacker !g news hacker!g news all work.
  - melonbar 8y ago
    Awesome, stellar tip.
  - 13of40 8y ago
    I must be too dumb to use this feature, because everything I enter, including the examples from the page, gives me "No Results Found". (Seems like it works from the main page, though.)
    - boomboomsubban 8y ago
      The page linked here is a searchable list of what bangs exist, like !hn for hackernews.
- melonbar 8y ago
  Wow, that is so true! I never thought of it like that but it can be a bother when you realize the search is going to need google behind it.
- shmerl 8y ago
  > I would love to be able to add the bang at the end I've always been using it that way, and it works fine. Did you have a problem with using it at the end?
- tiles 8y ago
  You can add bangs at the end afaik: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search%20!g https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search%20!g
- eerwrq 8y ago
  Good news. You can already put the band on the end. I just went to DDG, and searched "cats !gi" and it did a google image search. As for results - I find DDG has good results for most things. Sometimes it's better than google. Occasionally worse. So it's helpful to have the bang when i need it.
- msoucy 8y ago
  I just tested it, and bangs can be entered at the end of the search string. "foo bar !g" searches Google for "foo bar"
- matt7aylor 8y ago
  You can do this e.g. 'search string !w'
- adambard 8y ago
  I believe you can and have always been able to insert the bang anywhere in the query, as long as it has spaces between it and any words.
- charlesvdv 8y ago
  Actually, a bang can be inserted anywhere in your query if I understand properly your problem. ex: "duckduck!g search" works as expected and go to google!
- cdancette 8y ago
  But you already can insert a bang at the end of the search string
- flossball 8y ago
  It is the same as site:domain.name in google and most other search engines. You can add that at the end or beginning of the search string.
  - groovybits 8y ago
    you can also do: !site <domain> <search string> ex: !site news.ycombinator.com duckduckgo equates to: site:news.ycombinator.com duckduckgo
- magissima 8y ago
  Ecosia[0] does this by using a hash sign at the end of the string instead, like "query #g" to google "query". I prefer that to DDG's bangs, but ecosia only has a couple of available options[1]. e: Apparently DDG can do this after all, so ecosia is actually less flexible since the search tag has to come at the end! [0] ecosia.org [1] https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657321-What-are-search-tags- https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657321-What-...
- nickstanley574 8y ago
  "I would love to be able to add the bang at the end" That ability is already there. I use it all the time.
- bhhaskin 8y ago
  You already can add the bang at the end. That is what I do usually. I am also finding the exact opposite, I have been getting much better results on DDG than Google lately. DDG is a search engine where as Google is a marketing platform.
  - kungtotte 8y ago
    This is all anecdotal, but something like 90% of my searches are fine in DDG. The rest are for highly specific searches in narrow fields where there just aren't many results at all, or where there's lots of results in another language e.g. Japanese. Google is better at filtering those out.
- groovybits 8y ago
  you can already query with a bang at the end of the search string. <something you want to search> !g
- 300bps 8y ago
  I’ve been using DDG for about a year and find it works great. I never end up using google. Are there particular types of searches you have trouble with?
melonbar 8y ago
Such a fantastic feature. I can even search through Unity's docs, right from my search bar. Sure, DDG can be a little behind with search, but the bang feature more than makes up for it IMHO. I probably use DDG for ~80% of searches and it gets the job done. It is a small price to pay for peace of mind. Keep up the good work!
glaberficken 8y ago
I much prefer that the browser fulfills this role instead of the search engine. Like in chrome you can start typing "yt" [Tab] and search youtube Or in Firefox you can setup keywords and do "yt" [space] and search.
- Nadya 8y ago
  Chrome can also setup keywords, it's just not as easy as it used to be / as easy as right clicking any search field in Firefox. I also setup keywords for easier navigation of sites with short and consistent URL schemes.
  - criley2 8y ago
    Eh, Chrome's auto-keyword system works well in most cases, and the ones that don't it's very easy to right click on the address bar and click "Edit Search Engines" to clean up the list and create any search URL you want.
    - Nadya 8y ago
      You have to conduct a search then go edit the keyword - in Firefox you can right click a search bar if you wish to add it. Mucking around in the settings is less convenient - and since it uses the domain of the site as the keyword - I find it is always necessary to change the keyword. I use both browsers pretty extensively - Chromium at work and Firefox at home. Some internal tools don't work with Firefox very well, since they're only tested on Chrome.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  Same here, I use this for lots of things (Wikipedia in three languages, youtube, bing/google images, etc.). All I need to type is 1-3 characters and a space. By comparison, I find the exclamation mark extremely annoying to reach for simple queries because it takes my whole left hand basically out of reach of any other key, but then again, I also find the arrow keys relatively hard to reach and prefer Vim, so it's probably personal. For another datapoint, my brother doesn't mind the bang syntax.
- 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dmortin 8y ago
The problem with ! is that it's a shifted character, so it's not a good choice for something which you use many times a day. An unshifted character would be better. E.g. comma: ,w for wikipedia
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  It would be more efficient. If it was vim or emacs, you could rebind. I think it should be easy enough for ddg to make the special character customizable as set by a cookie.
- mholmes680 8y ago
  , is a marketing fail over ! though. (apologies to Yahoo)
- shdh 8y ago
  From the perspective of someone who uses bangs daily, it doesn't doesn't make a difference in terms of UX
have_faith 8y ago
I find bangs lacking from a UX perspective. It's not that I struggle to use them, like most of you I'm used to the terminal and text-based interfaces, but it just seems like a bad form of feature discovery for non-technically literate people. It would be nice if this sort of domain filtering could be done with the UI instead of relying on the bang itself (by all means leave it in for power users). You could just check a checkbox and a separate text box would appear for typing in the domain you want to filter on.
- leereeves 8y ago
  I like bangs because they can be used from the address bar of any browser. That couldn't be done with checkboxes.
  - have_faith 8y ago
    It's a good point. But I don't suggest removing them as I mentioned they are great for power users. I just think the functionality could be extended to users who are not used to text based interfaces like we are.
    - wodenokoto 8y ago
      Like the Firefox search bar? https://media.askvg.com/articles/images5/Mozilla_Firefox_New_Search_UI.png https://media.askvg.com/articles/images5/Mozilla_Firefox_New...
  - sigotirandolas 8y ago
    Bang syntax is super convenient for mobile browsers as well, in a way that nothing short of in-browser integration can replace. For example, AFAIK Safari for iOS can’t use custom search keywords, but you can set up DDG as the search engine and make accessing a lot of websites (e.g. Wikipedia, Google Translate, Wordreference, Google, Pubmed) a lot faster.
- lainga 8y ago
  Do you mean like a list of checkboxes? Pressing "!" in the DDG search bar already brings up a list of bang codes for suggested sites with icons that you can click on, I think that's enough even for light users.
vonzeppelin 8y ago
I find myself using !g, !a, !w, and !mw the most. I like that I can go directly to these services instead of a search page.
keeganjw 8y ago
Privacy is cool and all but this is the main reason I use DDG. I use the ! constantly. It makes search so much faster and enjoyable. I can go straight to what I want.
- wafflesraccoon 8y ago
  Hard agree, I just feel faster using DDG. Every once in a while I need to throw a !g to find what I want and that isn't a huge deal breaker for me. For 90% of searches it works great.
  - Timpy 8y ago
    Do you guys program? Google is like a brain extension, I'm worried DDG wouldn't give me the same results, and it would hurt my work flow.
    - keeganjw 8y ago
      You got !g for google, !gi for images, !gm for maps, !gt for translate, !gn for news, !gv or !yt for video, heck even !gf for flights. It helps you go straight to what you want.
thrifter 8y ago
Here's my collection of favorite DDG bangs: http://duckgobang.com http://duckgobang.com. It's my way of getting people off the Google habit and to try bangs instead.
PACordonnier 8y ago
I switched back to google after more than a year using duckduckgo, the results were just not as good as Google. However I'm still using the !bangs which are just an awesome feature, I higly recommend using http://www.duckduckgoog.com/ http://www.duckduckgoog.com/ which provides bangs on top of google search.
makecheck 8y ago
I use DDG kind of in the same way that I use multiple web browsers, where I prefer everything locked down in Firefox but occasionally sites won’t work very well unless I switch to Safari without add-ons running. Sometimes you just need Google results. Also, DDG+g! is a great way to get de-AMPed Google results on mobile.
dang 8y ago
A discussion from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772034
krylon 8y ago
It took me some conscious effort, but I finally managed to train myself to make DuckDuckGo my default search engine. I was vaguely aware of bangs, but I had not known how many other search engines it can tap into, this is really cool.
jaredcwhite 8y ago
This is a great presentation of the feature and a good directory to learn more about the bangs available. I use them all the time, usually regarding programming topics (language reference, GitHub, etc.), but now I see there are many more I could start using. !astock for Adobe Stock is just one example. Great feature! (I have DDG as my default in Safari so searching and using bangs is a breeze.)
jaden 8y ago
Several years ago I built https://shortmarks.com https://shortmarks.com as a way to use search shortcuts from any browser. The code isn't pretty and I haven't updated it in eons, but it works well enough.
shpx 8y ago
Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines, click to add a custom search engine and add search engines with short keywords. For example you can add "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s" https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s" with the keyword "y", then if you type "y whatever" in the omnibar it will search "whatever" on youtube. The big draw back is that you won't get search suggestions when using a keyword. Here are my most used custom search engines: w https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s search wikipedia using wikipedia's search engine ww https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%s&btn... search wikipedia through google and open the first result h https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%s https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%... results only from hacker news r https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s only search results from reddit y https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s youtube b http://93.174.95.27/search.php?req=%s http://93.174.95.27/search.php?req=%s search for books on libgen m https://www.google.ca/maps/search/%s https://www.google.ca/maps/search/%s google maps wo https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s wolfram alpha ima https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s google image search (I tried using "i" and "im", but those are often part of my query) s https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s search stack overflow through google st https://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s https://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s search all stack exchange sites through their search engine
- shdh 8y ago
  defaults vs tedious setup
Gitnumb 8y ago
This idea was tried 15 yrs ago or so. https://web.archive.org/web/20040612211249/http://www.osx.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040612211249/http://www.osx.co...
liminal 8y ago
I recently switched to DDG and while the results sometimes aren't as good as Google, the feeling of not worrying what my searches will do to my filter bubble is priceless. I realize I'm still tracked and profiled in a million other ways, but any improvement is welcome. The bangs are a nice touch, but much less important to me.
mcgwiz 8y ago
Interesting but probably not very useful. Major public websites invest heavily in SEO. So practically speaking, what the user actually wants can often be better surfaced with Google (which draws upon a great number of signals) than with on-site search (which could merely be backed by elasticsearch or by a relatively simple homegrown system).

107 points by tmlee 8y ago

I am a long time DDG user, going on 4 years? I am just now starting to revert back to google more and more as I start to find their results lacking. The main problem I have with bangs is that my mental mode for searching is always going directly to the search string first. The friction of having to back out of that and insert a bang is too much. I would love to be able to add the bang at the end, as it is often then that I realize a particular search string would be better suited for google or some other service (but mostly google). I'll send them that suggestion.

0942v8653 8y ago
I've been adding the bang at the end of the string for years, and you can even add it in the middle: hacker news !g hacker news!g hacker !g news hacker!g news all work.
- melonbar 8y ago
  Awesome, stellar tip.
- 13of40 8y ago
  I must be too dumb to use this feature, because everything I enter, including the examples from the page, gives me "No Results Found". (Seems like it works from the main page, though.)
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    The page linked here is a searchable list of what bangs exist, like !hn for hackernews.
melonbar 8y ago
Wow, that is so true! I never thought of it like that but it can be a bother when you realize the search is going to need google behind it.
shmerl 8y ago
> I would love to be able to add the bang at the end I've always been using it that way, and it works fine. Did you have a problem with using it at the end?
tiles 8y ago
You can add bangs at the end afaik: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search%20!g https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search%20!g
eerwrq 8y ago
Good news. You can already put the band on the end. I just went to DDG, and searched "cats !gi" and it did a google image search. As for results - I find DDG has good results for most things. Sometimes it's better than google. Occasionally worse. So it's helpful to have the bang when i need it.
msoucy 8y ago
I just tested it, and bangs can be entered at the end of the search string. "foo bar !g" searches Google for "foo bar"
matt7aylor 8y ago
You can do this e.g. 'search string !w'
adambard 8y ago
I believe you can and have always been able to insert the bang anywhere in the query, as long as it has spaces between it and any words.
charlesvdv 8y ago
Actually, a bang can be inserted anywhere in your query if I understand properly your problem. ex: "duckduck!g search" works as expected and go to google!
cdancette 8y ago
But you already can insert a bang at the end of the search string
flossball 8y ago
It is the same as site:domain.name in google and most other search engines. You can add that at the end or beginning of the search string.
- groovybits 8y ago
  you can also do: !site <domain> <search string> ex: !site news.ycombinator.com duckduckgo equates to: site:news.ycombinator.com duckduckgo
magissima 8y ago
Ecosia[0] does this by using a hash sign at the end of the string instead, like "query #g" to google "query". I prefer that to DDG's bangs, but ecosia only has a couple of available options[1]. e: Apparently DDG can do this after all, so ecosia is actually less flexible since the search tag has to come at the end! [0] ecosia.org [1] https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657321-What-are-search-tags- https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657321-What-...
nickstanley574 8y ago
"I would love to be able to add the bang at the end" That ability is already there. I use it all the time.
bhhaskin 8y ago
You already can add the bang at the end. That is what I do usually. I am also finding the exact opposite, I have been getting much better results on DDG than Google lately. DDG is a search engine where as Google is a marketing platform.
- kungtotte 8y ago
  This is all anecdotal, but something like 90% of my searches are fine in DDG. The rest are for highly specific searches in narrow fields where there just aren't many results at all, or where there's lots of results in another language e.g. Japanese. Google is better at filtering those out.
groovybits 8y ago
you can already query with a bang at the end of the search string. <something you want to search> !g
300bps 8y ago
I’ve been using DDG for about a year and find it works great. I never end up using google. Are there particular types of searches you have trouble with?

melonbar 8y ago

Such a fantastic feature. I can even search through Unity's docs, right from my search bar. Sure, DDG can be a little behind with search, but the bang feature more than makes up for it IMHO. I probably use DDG for ~80% of searches and it gets the job done. It is a small price to pay for peace of mind. Keep up the good work!

glaberficken 8y ago

I much prefer that the browser fulfills this role instead of the search engine. Like in chrome you can start typing "yt" [Tab] and search youtube Or in Firefox you can setup keywords and do "yt" [space] and search.

Nadya 8y ago
Chrome can also setup keywords, it's just not as easy as it used to be / as easy as right clicking any search field in Firefox. I also setup keywords for easier navigation of sites with short and consistent URL schemes.
- criley2 8y ago
  Eh, Chrome's auto-keyword system works well in most cases, and the ones that don't it's very easy to right click on the address bar and click "Edit Search Engines" to clean up the list and create any search URL you want.
  - Nadya 8y ago
    You have to conduct a search then go edit the keyword - in Firefox you can right click a search bar if you wish to add it. Mucking around in the settings is less convenient - and since it uses the domain of the site as the keyword - I find it is always necessary to change the keyword. I use both browsers pretty extensively - Chromium at work and Firefox at home. Some internal tools don't work with Firefox very well, since they're only tested on Chrome.
lucb1e 8y ago
Same here, I use this for lots of things (Wikipedia in three languages, youtube, bing/google images, etc.). All I need to type is 1-3 characters and a space. By comparison, I find the exclamation mark extremely annoying to reach for simple queries because it takes my whole left hand basically out of reach of any other key, but then again, I also find the arrow keys relatively hard to reach and prefer Vim, so it's probably personal. For another datapoint, my brother doesn't mind the bang syntax.
8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dmortin 8y ago

The problem with ! is that it's a shifted character, so it's not a good choice for something which you use many times a day. An unshifted character would be better. E.g. comma: ,w for wikipedia

stochastic_monk 8y ago
It would be more efficient. If it was vim or emacs, you could rebind. I think it should be easy enough for ddg to make the special character customizable as set by a cookie.
mholmes680 8y ago
, is a marketing fail over ! though. (apologies to Yahoo)
shdh 8y ago
From the perspective of someone who uses bangs daily, it doesn't doesn't make a difference in terms of UX

have_faith 8y ago

I find bangs lacking from a UX perspective. It's not that I struggle to use them, like most of you I'm used to the terminal and text-based interfaces, but it just seems like a bad form of feature discovery for non-technically literate people. It would be nice if this sort of domain filtering could be done with the UI instead of relying on the bang itself (by all means leave it in for power users). You could just check a checkbox and a separate text box would appear for typing in the domain you want to filter on.

leereeves 8y ago
I like bangs because they can be used from the address bar of any browser. That couldn't be done with checkboxes.
- have_faith 8y ago
  It's a good point. But I don't suggest removing them as I mentioned they are great for power users. I just think the functionality could be extended to users who are not used to text based interfaces like we are.
  - wodenokoto 8y ago
    Like the Firefox search bar? https://media.askvg.com/articles/images5/Mozilla_Firefox_New_Search_UI.png https://media.askvg.com/articles/images5/Mozilla_Firefox_New...
- sigotirandolas 8y ago
  Bang syntax is super convenient for mobile browsers as well, in a way that nothing short of in-browser integration can replace. For example, AFAIK Safari for iOS can’t use custom search keywords, but you can set up DDG as the search engine and make accessing a lot of websites (e.g. Wikipedia, Google Translate, Wordreference, Google, Pubmed) a lot faster.
lainga 8y ago
Do you mean like a list of checkboxes? Pressing "!" in the DDG search bar already brings up a list of bang codes for suggested sites with icons that you can click on, I think that's enough even for light users.

vonzeppelin 8y ago

I find myself using !g, !a, !w, and !mw the most. I like that I can go directly to these services instead of a search page.

keeganjw 8y ago

Privacy is cool and all but this is the main reason I use DDG. I use the ! constantly. It makes search so much faster and enjoyable. I can go straight to what I want.

wafflesraccoon 8y ago
Hard agree, I just feel faster using DDG. Every once in a while I need to throw a !g to find what I want and that isn't a huge deal breaker for me. For 90% of searches it works great.
- Timpy 8y ago
  Do you guys program? Google is like a brain extension, I'm worried DDG wouldn't give me the same results, and it would hurt my work flow.
  - keeganjw 8y ago
    You got !g for google, !gi for images, !gm for maps, !gt for translate, !gn for news, !gv or !yt for video, heck even !gf for flights. It helps you go straight to what you want.

thrifter 8y ago

Here's my collection of favorite DDG bangs: http://duckgobang.com http://duckgobang.com. It's my way of getting people off the Google habit and to try bangs instead.

PACordonnier 8y ago

I switched back to google after more than a year using duckduckgo, the results were just not as good as Google. However I'm still using the !bangs which are just an awesome feature, I higly recommend using http://www.duckduckgoog.com/ http://www.duckduckgoog.com/ which provides bangs on top of google search.

makecheck 8y ago

I use DDG kind of in the same way that I use multiple web browsers, where I prefer everything locked down in Firefox but occasionally sites won’t work very well unless I switch to Safari without add-ons running. Sometimes you just need Google results. Also, DDG+g! is a great way to get de-AMPed Google results on mobile.

dang 8y ago

A discussion from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772034

krylon 8y ago

It took me some conscious effort, but I finally managed to train myself to make DuckDuckGo my default search engine. I was vaguely aware of bangs, but I had not known how many other search engines it can tap into, this is really cool.

jaredcwhite 8y ago

This is a great presentation of the feature and a good directory to learn more about the bangs available. I use them all the time, usually regarding programming topics (language reference, GitHub, etc.), but now I see there are many more I could start using. !astock for Adobe Stock is just one example. Great feature! (I have DDG as my default in Safari so searching and using bangs is a breeze.)

jaden 8y ago

Several years ago I built https://shortmarks.com https://shortmarks.com as a way to use search shortcuts from any browser. The code isn't pretty and I haven't updated it in eons, but it works well enough.

shpx 8y ago

Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines, click to add a custom search engine and add search engines with short keywords. For example you can add "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s" https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s" with the keyword "y", then if you type "y whatever" in the omnibar it will search "whatever" on youtube. The big draw back is that you won't get search suggestions when using a keyword. Here are my most used custom search engines: w https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s search wikipedia using wikipedia's search engine ww https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%s&btn... search wikipedia through google and open the first result h https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%s https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%... results only from hacker news r https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s only search results from reddit y https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s youtube b http://93.174.95.27/search.php?req=%s http://93.174.95.27/search.php?req=%s search for books on libgen m https://www.google.ca/maps/search/%s https://www.google.ca/maps/search/%s google maps wo https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%s wolfram alpha ima https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s google image search (I tried using "i" and "im", but those are often part of my query) s https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s search stack overflow through google st https://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s https://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s search all stack exchange sites through their search engine

shdh 8y ago
defaults vs tedious setup

Gitnumb 8y ago

This idea was tried 15 yrs ago or so. https://web.archive.org/web/20040612211249/http://www.osx.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040612211249/http://www.osx.co...

liminal 8y ago

I recently switched to DDG and while the results sometimes aren't as good as Google, the feeling of not worrying what my searches will do to my filter bubble is priceless. I realize I'm still tracked and profiled in a million other ways, but any improvement is welcome. The bangs are a nice touch, but much less important to me.

mcgwiz 8y ago

Interesting but probably not very useful. Major public websites invest heavily in SEO. So practically speaking, what the user actually wants can often be better surfaced with Google (which draws upon a great number of signals) than with on-site search (which could merely be backed by elasticsearch or by a relatively simple homegrown system).