They're called bangs. :)
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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Its amazing, I work in the IT industry, I love exploring different areas of tech, but the concept of bangs in a search engine has never come up haha. I've seen not ever really used them in a terminal when forgetting to run a command as sudo
There's also searXNG (https://docs.searxng.org/ which is a customisable search. I like to use Paulgo.io.
I really need to try this out at some point. Just been too lazy to give it a shot
Firefox also allows to make them for different search fields, e.g. if I write pic and then my querry, it brings me images.google.com results. Kinda nice if bangs don't cover your usecases.
Where do I go to configure that?
If you bookmark a URL you can add %s to the URL somewhere to add a query. If you the use a keyword on the bookmark (the bottom field, usually) you can do [keyword] term and it'll replace the %s with term
The most powerful bang is ! , which is "I'm feeling lucky". It combines with everything.
mdn http status ! will show you the http status code list on mdn, GitHub actions docs workflow context ! will lead you right to the correct docs.
Awesome! I just have made my contribution sending a new bang :D
But why would I want a bunch of ads and SEO shit that doesn't answer my question?
Bangs are great.
My favorites are:
!wfor Wikipedia!dfor a Dictionary!tfor a Thesaurus!ytfor YouTube!archivewebfor the Internet Archive
and I've found it usually works with pretty much any site name you're thinking of searching (e.g. if you want to look up a movie on IMDB, chances are !imdb will take you there.)
You forgot the most important one
- !aw for Arch Wiki
This is just one of multiple bangs for the Internet Archive, and probably more intuitive and quick ones include:
!iafor the Internet Archive generally!wbmfor the Wayback Machine
oh, thanks, that'll make it way quicker for me to type out!
!wa for Wolfram Alpha and !aw for the Arch Wiki as well!
!udUrban Dictionary!startrekStar Trek wiki!stargateStargate wiki!waybackWayback Machine!tineyeReverse image search!bangCheck if there are any DuckDuckGo bangs for a particular site!itadIs There Any Deal?!steamSteam store!spStartpage
You can also use a bang itself, with nothing else before or after it, to just go to the homepage for that website. That can be simpler than typing out the whole URL.
The dictionary bang is 100% something I'll be using quite often moving forward
!Arch - The Archlinux wiki, btw
Using DDG to route into Google defeats the point of avoiding Google in the first place.
Use !sp instead to route your search through Startpage, which is essentially Google without the Google BS.
DuckDuckGo is an alright default but sometimes I just need that better, more tailored search from Google.
Nowadays I often use AI for questions though. It gives better results and a more comfortable way.
I hear you, but sometimes when I'm working I want 2 things when trying to solve a problem quickly; 1. Accurate results, and 2. Speed and performance.
So while I do use SP on occasion, I find that sometimes for me it can take a while to load the results and just generally get a bit laggy. This can really start to annoy me over the course of a day, it's those moments when I just bite the bullet and go to Google directly if DuckDuckGo isn't giving me what I need
Only needed for about 2% of my queries. So definitely doesn't defeat the purpose if 98% of my queries don't leak out to google.
it used to be a great way to get google results that weren't custom. then in 2019 google disabled that api
Wanna search on “google” without selling your data to google.
Well just like duckduckgo is basically bing but with trackers removed, startpage https://startpage.com/ is the same for google!
Bangs also work on Kagi.
That feature to search a multitude of websites via Duck Duck Go was a gamechanger when I found out about it some years ago. I've not gone back since.
Or g! Or at the end.
Also w! for wikipedia.
I think there's a few more.
This works in Brave search too, at the beginning or at the end of the query string. There are 12474 bangs available as of the moment of writing this comment (!). I believe all of those work on DDG too.
Have the search results on Brave Search improved? I tried it a few months after they launched it and found the results terrible
I switched to it from DDG which I found was enshittifying lately, but to be honest I don't really like it that much, just gave a bit better results than DDGs and has bangs, but the AI thing is absolute BS and there's no way to disable it without saving cookies on your browser.
Now that I look at startpage again I'm thinking to give it another try but am not sure if it has bangs too and if you can set settings in their GET method as you can with DDG.
Works in brave too!
I use !gi a lot because brave image search sucks lol
Huh. Did not know that.
But also why?! If I thought that Google search would be more effective I just would have used Google to begin with.
Or use !()startpage for more private search using google's results. Sadly it's much more typing.
Edit: there's !s bang, it's as short as !g
According to another comment !sp is a shorter version of same
Or just use Startpage.com directly