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Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice. I keep leaving DDG for the not-always-super-relevant
by edj 13y ago
Duck duck is barely usable ... but they don't spy on you. The !g and !b commands make it my first choice.
I keep leaving DDG for the not-always-super-relevant results, and I keep coming back for the privacy, clean interface, and !bang syntax.
I love that using it means my searches are private by default. But the real killer feature is !bang. I find that it's faster to do a Google image search using DDG with "!gi" than to search in Google and then move my hand to the mouse and click "Images".
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- joesb 13y agoWhy do people talk about this !bang syntax so much? I can do the same thing with search provider shortcut in my browser. For example, after setting up once, I can press "Ctrl+L" then type "gi" then "Tab" and start typing my search keyword. I don't even have to first go to Google or DDG.
- ngpio 13y agoBecause setting up a shortcut once for many hundreds[1] of sites is more demanding work than typing ! each time. There's a bang for almost every site I frequent, and when a site changes its domain or search URI the bang is updated to reflect it almost immediately with no work on my end. After a few weeks of acquainting myself with the bang system, I started to see web search from a completely different perspective. I think of a search engine now as less of an "everything index" and more of an "index of contextual searches". My mind, instead of just thinking "I'll google it", thinks "I'll choose a context for it". Google is like a system-wide grep whose output is altered by advertising, and DDG w/ bangs is like a vast collection of commands piped into a grep. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html