3 ms·

Why 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

• ngpio 13y ago
  Because 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