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Their bangs are genius in that they already provide a natural way for you to give feedback without actually having to think about it - rerun a query with !g, an

by Vinnl 8y ago

Their bangs are genius in that they already provide a natural way for you to give feedback without actually having to think about it - rerun a query with !g, and they will redirect you to Google. Good for you, good for DDG, since they can tell which queries provide insufficient results. Of course, you can't suggest the correct result for a specific search term, because search engines don't do a one-on-one matching of terms and results. But this will allow them to analyse at what types of queries their engine performs badly, and to improve it there. (I don't know if they actually do this, but the theoretically can and should.)

zapzupnz 8y ago
Thing is, bangs are for people who don't use launchers (Alfred, LaunchBar, QuikSilver, Launchy, Gnome Do, Unity Dash, etc.) with web search functions. To redo a search for me: Cmd-Space, Up, Return. To add a bang to a failed DDG search: click in a search bar, make sure the whole search text isn't selected so it won't be replaced, remember which bang I want, type it in, return. Those who don't use launchers outnumber us greatly, of course. But by virtue of being able to specify an alternative search engine using the same efficient keyboard commands as everything else, bangs aren't much more than a pain in the butt. Even putting launchers aside, not every DDG user is going to use bangs to get results from another site. I'm sure many, as I, have the muscle memory to bring up google.com in the flash of an eye, whereas awkwardly clicking in a search bar to type in a bang surely can't be used by even the majority of DDG users. (Of course, I don't have data to back me up, but say DDG became as ubiquitous as Google, this would be unquestioned. All the users' habits in organisations where Qwant is set as the default could make an interesting data set — except, of course, it wouldn't be possible to track who used what) tl;dr: Bangs are too inefficient and usage must be too inconsistent to use as the basis of improving the results.

by Vinnl 8y ago

zapzupnz 8y ago

Thing is, bangs are for people who don't use launchers (Alfred, LaunchBar, QuikSilver, Launchy, Gnome Do, Unity Dash, etc.) with web search functions. To redo a search for me: Cmd-Space, Up, Return. To add a bang to a failed DDG search: click in a search bar, make sure the whole search text isn't selected so it won't be replaced, remember which bang I want, type it in, return. Those who don't use launchers outnumber us greatly, of course. But by virtue of being able to specify an alternative search engine using the same efficient keyboard commands as everything else, bangs aren't much more than a pain in the butt. Even putting launchers aside, not every DDG user is going to use bangs to get results from another site. I'm sure many, as I, have the muscle memory to bring up google.com in the flash of an eye, whereas awkwardly clicking in a search bar to type in a bang surely can't be used by even the majority of DDG users. (Of course, I don't have data to back me up, but say DDG became as ubiquitous as Google, this would be unquestioned. All the users' habits in organisations where Qwant is set as the default could make an interesting data set — except, of course, it wouldn't be possible to track who used what) tl;dr: Bangs are too inefficient and usage must be too inconsistent to use as the basis of improving the results.