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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 ju
by 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 agoI like bangs because they can be used from the address bar of any browser. That couldn't be done with checkboxes.
- have_faith 8y agoIt'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 agoLike 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 agoBang 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 agoDo 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.
- have_faith 8y agoNo, just one checkbox for "filter by domain" or however you would phrase it, and second text input for typing wikipedia or whatever would appear. I know this seems like a trivial difference because for us it is, but it means that the functionality is completely discoverable from the UI instead of having to remember how the hidden functionality works. It makes a big difference to less technically literate users.