4 ms·

Wow looking at that bang list (which is ridiculously huge) I finally understand why ddg is superior to google. Google is doing it's best to take all the knobs

Wow looking at that bang list (which is ridiculously huge) I finally understand why ddg is superior to google. Google is doing it's best to take all the knobs and dials away making you reliant on it guessing your intention correctly. Which is pushing us into a monoculture (the ignoring of important keywords is getting more egregious).. Anyway ddg is doing the complete opposite, I feel like I can actually find anything if I use it properly (but like with any other tool you need to learn how). I have it set as the default on some my machines but it's clear I haven't been using even half of it's potential.

riquito 8y ago
I'm baffled, that's a list of thousands keywords that you won't ever be able to learn nor revisit to find what's new, and it makes you think it makes ddg superior to another product? What if it were 100 times longer, would it make it even more compelling? Looking at the list makes me think that parsing of simple sentences is the way to go (like "translate xyz from swedish to russian") or the site:someurl filter from Google, not having a keyword per site or per language
- targafarian 8y ago
  The point of bangs is to make searching your favorite website really fast and easy. Find your favorite website/search and remember the bang for that, and you can search it from DDG with very few keystrokes (the biggies have fewer letters, so bangs end up roughly Huffman coded). But you can also use site:wikipedia.org syntax in DDG to search any particular website, just like in Google. So don't criticize bangs for not being good at everything "site:" allows you to do, they're different tools; use the right tool for the job. DDG gives you many of the same tools that Google gives, but adds many other tools. And DDG has shown willingness to add more tools; just find/remember the (small) subset of these that helps you out, and someone else can find/remember those tools that help them out, and you each have good user experiences.

riquito 8y ago

I'm baffled, that's a list of thousands keywords that you won't ever be able to learn nor revisit to find what's new, and it makes you think it makes ddg superior to another product? What if it were 100 times longer, would it make it even more compelling? Looking at the list makes me think that parsing of simple sentences is the way to go (like "translate xyz from swedish to russian") or the site:someurl filter from Google, not having a keyword per site or per language

targafarian 8y ago
The point of bangs is to make searching your favorite website really fast and easy. Find your favorite website/search and remember the bang for that, and you can search it from DDG with very few keystrokes (the biggies have fewer letters, so bangs end up roughly Huffman coded). But you can also use site:wikipedia.org syntax in DDG to search any particular website, just like in Google. So don't criticize bangs for not being good at everything "site:" allows you to do, they're different tools; use the right tool for the job. DDG gives you many of the same tools that Google gives, but adds many other tools. And DDG has shown willingness to add more tools; just find/remember the (small) subset of these that helps you out, and someone else can find/remember those tools that help them out, and you each have good user experiences.