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Quick question: What's the advantage of bangs over adding a custom search engine to something like Firefox? In Firefox, we can right click any search bar and a
by kxyvr 8y ago
Quick question: What's the advantage of bangs over adding a custom search engine to something like Firefox? In Firefox, we can right click any search bar and add a keyword for the search, so we could just type something like "w topic" to search Wikipedia for some topic. Anyway, maybe there's something I'm missing, but I am curious.
- majewsky 8y agoThere are some bangs that do not directly correspond to search boxes. For example, "!rfc 2616" expands into https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616
- illnewsthat 8y agoI was thinking the same. I have a ton of custom search engines in Google Chrome. Examples: gi (google image search) gl (google i'm feeling lucky search) y (youtube) wa (wolfram alpha) i (imdb search) w (wiki search) m (google maps directions from my home address) d (definition) a (amazon) f (stock/finance)
- clubm8 8y ago>I have a ton of custom search engines in Google Chrome. Many of those have the exact same abreviation for their bang command. All of them should be available. I prefer having the same search engine anywhere I use DDG versus only having custom search engines on machines I've customized.
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoWikipedia’s in-built search has historically been poorer than third-party search like Google. That is why people prefer to use a bang on DDG to show all relevant content on Wikipedia’s domain.
- dredmorbius 8y ago!w drops to Wikipedia's native search, not DDG's. I use it precisely for this.
- Jaxan 8y agoTo me the advantage is that it works in any browser. So I don’t have to set up anything. It evens works on mobile.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoAll of DDG's bangs already exist. I can just think up what the bang probably looks like and lo-and-behold: it works. Try !mdn, !tvtropes, !deb, !wayback...