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Ah, I was unaware of the !g bang syntax, that's a great one. I'm also fond of !archwiki, and all the language bangs. DuckDuckGo is the only search engine that I

Ah, I was unaware of the !g bang syntax, that's a great one. I'm also fond of !archwiki, and all the language bangs. DuckDuckGo is the only search engine that I know of that could take over a significant portion of search traffic. By significant I don't mean tens of millions, but I mean a dedicated userbase who use it in leue of Google.

dsrguru 14y ago
Just out of curiosity, what does DuckDuckGo do that conventional keyword searches in Firefox or Chrome don't do?
- noahc 14y ago
  I have DDG set as my default search engine, but can you do the following: ! fuji Ames => takes me to Fuji Steak House in Ames Iowa directly !w Sushi => Takes me Directly to the article on Sushi on Wikipedia !m 801 grand ave Des Moines => takes me directly to google maps at the address. I still probably do about 30% of my searches using !g kicking me straight to google for search results.
  - dsrguru 14y ago
    But how is that different from regular keyword searches? If I want to pull up the Wikipedia article on sushi in Firefox, I enter "w sushi" in the URL bar. If I want to read the Arch Linux wiki article on pacman, I type "arch pacman". If I want to watch Friday by Rebecca Black on Youtube, I type "y Friday", etc. I feel like there's more than a 50% chance that I'm missing something. What does DDG do that browsers don't?
    - noahc 14y ago
      I typed in "w sushi" into chrome and I got https://www.google.com/search?aq=f&ix=ucb&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=w+sushi https://www.google.com/search?aq=f&ix=ucb&sourceid=c... which google set to my default. I expected to get "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi Do I have to setup all these different keywords to work? If so that's the difference. It's essentially a pre-configured command line with literally hundreds (thousands?) of predefined syntax for searches.
      - dsrguru 14y ago
        Yes, I set those keyword searches myself. So the difference seems to be that with DDG, you just have to learn which shortcuts exist rather than customizing them yourself. That doesn't really sound like it saves much time, but it sounds like the real advantage of DDG is that the act of reading through the DDG list of keywords would probably give me ideas of useful time-saving shortcuts that I'd never think of making on my own.
- tripzilch 14y ago
  Of course you can put all those keyword searches into your browser. The only difference is that DDG has already made a huge selection, so you don't have to, anymore. So basically, DDG probably has a whole bunch of !bang searches that you simply had not thought of to create your own keywords for, yet. And when you need it, it's already there. There are also a few !bang queries that are not external searches, such as one for rolling dice (it can do !roll 3d6+3). Another minor difference is that you can add the !bang keyword anywhere inside the query, also at the end. Being able to add it at the end makes it easier to "ok let's try this on another search engine".

dsrguru 14y ago

Just out of curiosity, what does DuckDuckGo do that conventional keyword searches in Firefox or Chrome don't do?

noahc 14y ago
I have DDG set as my default search engine, but can you do the following: ! fuji Ames => takes me to Fuji Steak House in Ames Iowa directly !w Sushi => Takes me Directly to the article on Sushi on Wikipedia !m 801 grand ave Des Moines => takes me directly to google maps at the address. I still probably do about 30% of my searches using !g kicking me straight to google for search results.
- dsrguru 14y ago
  But how is that different from regular keyword searches? If I want to pull up the Wikipedia article on sushi in Firefox, I enter "w sushi" in the URL bar. If I want to read the Arch Linux wiki article on pacman, I type "arch pacman". If I want to watch Friday by Rebecca Black on Youtube, I type "y Friday", etc. I feel like there's more than a 50% chance that I'm missing something. What does DDG do that browsers don't?
  - noahc 14y ago
    I typed in "w sushi" into chrome and I got https://www.google.com/search?aq=f&ix=ucb&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=w+sushi https://www.google.com/search?aq=f&ix=ucb&sourceid=c... which google set to my default. I expected to get "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi Do I have to setup all these different keywords to work? If so that's the difference. It's essentially a pre-configured command line with literally hundreds (thousands?) of predefined syntax for searches.
    - dsrguru 14y ago
      Yes, I set those keyword searches myself. So the difference seems to be that with DDG, you just have to learn which shortcuts exist rather than customizing them yourself. That doesn't really sound like it saves much time, but it sounds like the real advantage of DDG is that the act of reading through the DDG list of keywords would probably give me ideas of useful time-saving shortcuts that I'd never think of making on my own.
tripzilch 14y ago
Of course you can put all those keyword searches into your browser. The only difference is that DDG has already made a huge selection, so you don't have to, anymore. So basically, DDG probably has a whole bunch of !bang searches that you simply had not thought of to create your own keywords for, yet. And when you need it, it's already there. There are also a few !bang queries that are not external searches, such as one for rolling dice (it can do !roll 3d6+3). Another minor difference is that you can add the !bang keyword anywhere inside the query, also at the end. Being able to add it at the end makes it easier to "ok let's try this on another search engine".