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>Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in
by clubm8 7y ago
>Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in searches
One upside of DDG is the bangs. If I know what I want is on wikipedia, just prepend !w.
I think folks need to learn how people searched pre-pagerank.
People treat google queries like a venn diagram with their top result being at the intersection, rather than using logical operators like AND, quotes, and -.
(Ex: "yoda -baby")
- jmiskovic 7y agoWhy search wikipedia through DDG? Use address bar search shortcuts. In firefox any website search bar can be assigned a shortcut by right-clicking it. These shortcuts for wikipedia, HN, maps, powerthesaurus, reddit and others makes for ~80% of my searches.
- dredmorbius 7y agoNot all browsers have address-bar shortcuts. Bangs are a common term across DDG users, and can be shared references, personal shortcuts not so much. It's a bit like language as a common understanding rather than individual headspaces. In a sense, bangs are social. How useful that is or isn't I don't know entirely, but bang-based search seems to be a distinctive class of activity, and gives rise to its own forms of communication and discovery. I've learned (and shared) new sites/services through bangs.