4 ms·

Now that I've gotten used to them, I really like the !bang operators. They're incredibly convenient. A few of the ones I abuse constantly: !g - google !bi -

• jgallag8 12y ago
  Didn't know you could just use '!g'. Very cool!
• arca_vorago 12y ago
  !images goes straight to google images.
• mattmanser 12y ago
  Why are bangs good? Why not just go to the site? Also Stackoverflow's search and many other site searches are totally rubbish. Not a bit, but totally rubbish. Here's an example: "!so c# read file" => this delivers useless results, the top result being "Reading Excel files from C#" Compare that to "stackoverflow c# read file" on google, which delivers what you actually want, with the question "Reading From a Text File in C#".
  • vacri 12y ago
    You don't have to load the site (trivial, but not negligible), throwing a bang in front of an already written search is simpler than rewriting the search, and google doesn't build a profile around you as another entity is doing the search.
    • icebraining 12y ago
      another entity is doing the search. What? It redirects your browser to Google, it's you doing the search, not any other entity. They don't proxy or anything.
      • ripdog 12y ago
        He means that, for example, "!hn rust" would search hacker news directly for rust, whereas "hacker news rust" on google would do a similar job but via google, informing google of your search.
        • wutbrodo 12y ago
          That's definitely not what his comment says. He's quite clearly talking about !g (not other bangs) and saying (incorrectly) that another entity (DDG) is doing the Google search so Google can't build a profile around you.
        • vacri 12y ago
          Sorry, ripdog and icebraining - I got it wrong. I hadn't played with ddg for a while and my memory was in error - I recalled !g returning google results in the ddg interface. My mistake. I couldn't correct it because of HN's stupid 5-comment policy that applies to comments made in all threads combined, and couldn't edit the original comment with a correction as it had been more than an hour. :/
  • girvo 12y ago
    And if you search a programming term in DDG, it'll show you relevant results from SO in-line on the results page, which is pretty lovely.
  • glaslong 12y ago
    > Why not just go to the site? Setting DuckDuckGo as my default and using !s means I can search any of those sites without having to go to them first. It takes a step out of the process.
• pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  I tried DDG for a while (a month, but probably a year ago now) but found I was always doing "!g <search terms>". So I just went back to using the address bar for searching and just the standard FF shortcuts (called "search engine keywords" IIRC) + a few extras I've added over the years. On Firefox I have g - google ddg - duckduckgo yt - youtube w - wikipedia etc. easy to type without the bang at the front (Google and Wikipedia are defaults, not sure what the other ones are). I gather on DDG you can use them at the end so you need the ! as a delimiter.
  • Ar-Curunir 12y ago
    you can use startpage if you want Google's results with none of the privacy leakage.
    • icebraining 12y ago
      I wonder how they got that deal.
      • Ar-Curunir 12y ago
        They pass your queries through a proxy, so you have to trust startpage, I guess.
        • icebraining 12y ago
          No, I mean, I wonder how Startpage got a deal from Google to proxy their results. What's in it for Google?
  • jimmaswell 12y ago
    A nice thing about these is that they work on Firefox Mobile if you sync it.