Since I started using DuckDuckGo in the early 2010s, one of my favorite features that made me stay around to this day was the !bangs.
Essentially, if you want to search on a particular website, you don’t need to open that page before starting to search. With bangs, you just use the appropriate 2 or 3 character code in your search box (browser, home page, etc.), together with your search query, and you are promptly redirected to that website.
Over time this becomes muscle memory and is pretty damn useful. Today there are more than 10,000 of them, and several other search engines copied the feature.
Last year, I decided to switch my search provider to a European one. The only thing I missed during the transition was the bangs feature. Ecosia supports a few, but the offering is very limited, and the “codes” are not necessarily the same. Just to give you a glimpse, I’m missing !pypi, !deb, !ub,!gh and a few others.
Another problem
Although I am a heavy user of this feature, it always felt wasteful, given we are including an intermediary on a functionality that could easily be done locally.
Browser --> *Search Engine* --> Website Search --> Results
But you know, convenience and habits are mighty forces.
Anyway, recently I found out that Firefox can do this for us, and even better, you can add “unlimited” custom bangs to your setup. Even after decades, Firefox keeps surprising me occasionally with features that were there right in front of my eyes, but I never noticed them.
Setting up keyword searches in Firefox
So allow me to explain. This wonderful browser empowers the user to create a similar experience to the bangs in two ways:
Both work the same way; the only practical difference I’ve noticed so far is that the former gives you a nice visual indicator:
And the second doesn’t:
But on the other hand, the latter might be easier to export and move around.
It doesn’t matter the approach that you pick; ultimately, it allows you to add any number of custom !bangs and removes the middlemen.