[froogie]

For me, bangs are the actual killer feature. Because when I set DDG as my default search engine in my browser, I get to use bangs at the address bar.

So for example rather than having to use Wikipedia's or Stack Overflow's search bar to find something, it's just Ctrl+t and "!w <term>" or "!gi <term>".

On Windows this is quite 50-50 -- you're likely holding the mouse anyway. On Unix machines with more keyboard-oriented UI, with say a tiling WM, things like bangs at browser address bar are a godsent. Of course it is nice on mobile too -- direct queries rather than hoppping around using clumsy touchscreen.

There are likely browser extensions for this though, but none of them set DDG as their default search engine -- so just doing that manually also gives you the bangs so in my book DDG wins here ;)

[dash2]

Firefox lets you set up search keywords, which to match the same thing. They used to be hidden away, but more recently they’ve got promoted a bit and are quite easy to set up.

[tordanik]

Firefox search keywords are awesome! They can be much shorter than bangs because there's no need to avoid name conflicts with thousands of sites you aren't using. Plus, no exclamation mark, and you can use them for sites at work which aren't publicly visible.

[pbhjpbhj]

I don't get it, I've been using the native equivalent "forever", aka keywords, you just get to set your own, and don't need to use ! (but you can't put them at the end, which has utility on DDG).