[hfsh]

> I liked DDG because it respected the user.

Unless you were searching for anything recipe-related, in which case they will push results from their partner 'yummly'. Or if you were trying to get literal result from you search string, which it will apparently silently ignore if it doesn't find enough results.

Honestly, I'll dump DDG in a heartbeat whenever I find something even marginally better. Their only edge is the '!' syntax which I haven't yet bothered to find an independent solution for.

[tyler_sf]

>Their only edge is the '!' syntax which I haven't yet bothered to find an independent solution for.

I simply mimic that bang behavior using my browser's ability to add custom searches. It's a slight pain to set up on a fresh install because of all the extra addresses I manually plug in but once done, I'm not necessarily tied to any search engine. If you're in Chromium you can right-click on the address bar and see the option to select "manage search engines." From there just start editing commands and changing things from ":yt" to "!yt" like we're used to. yt being a YouTube search.

Your usage might be vastly different than mine but I found myself using sipmle things like !yt (youtube) or !hn (hackernews search) for the most part. Hardly anything beyond that and a few specific Wikis.

For what it's worth, Brave's search engine also uses that ! bang feature though I'm not sure to what extent compared to DuckDuckGo.

[soundnote]

Firefox can sync those keywords via bookmarks, but the feature's deprecated and not supported on mobile anymore, as expected.

[emmo]

Kagi has been a dream. They support bangs as well.

I was only on the wait list for a couple of weeks before getting an invite; worth jumping in.

[julianlam]

But why aren't bangs more ubiquitous? Did DDG patent them or something?

The actual logic behind it isn't anything stunning, it finds a bang, removes it from the query, then forwards the query to the search engine that was requested.