[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.