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by eviks 898 days ago
It's better to lose the inconvenient ! and use a browser that supports prefixes in the search bar

Then you can "w chemistry" to open Wikipedia with a list of suggestions from the same Wikipedia ("Chemistry (Girls Aloud album)") in the same place
2 comments
rpdillon 898 days ago
I think everyone in the thread knows about "search engines" in Chrome and bookmark keywords in Firefox. The crux of the issue is that there are more than 10,000 bang commands in DDG. Setting up even a popular subset in any given browser is a significant investment. It's fine if it's the browser you use 99% of the time, but for those spanning multiple computers, phones, and other devices, simply using bang commands is a strict win.

https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

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eviks 898 days ago
99% of the time you use <0.1% of the bangs, so setting those up isn't a significant investment. Then there are also the downsides mentioned above (less convenient, no preview, not portable across search engines), so no, it's not a strict win, but an inferior alternative which is superior only in those cases where you can't setup something better
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hedora 898 days ago
If I went that route, I’d have to set them up on my phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc, all of which have different operating systems/web browsers.

I guess I could implement them as a web server, and point all my devices at it.

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eviks 898 days ago
Some browsers sync these settings, so that removes a lot of the complexity. But in general, you're repeating the same mistake. No, you wouldn't have to do that, you'd just set it up on the devices you use the most to get the most convenience in the most common cases, and then use the less convenient option on others.

There is no point in making 100% of your experience worse just because you can't make 100% of your experience better

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hedora 897 days ago
None of the browsers I use across those devices sync settings well. Even if it was 100% firefox, I don't want to trust the cloud, and can't be bothered to set up a mozilla sync server just for this (I don't use bookmarks, and there aren't any other settings I want to sync).

Also, as it is, I make 100% of my experience better by switching all the browsers to a search engine that provides better results than google and has !bang support.

There are at least two such search engines: duck duck go and kagi.

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eviks 897 days ago
To make an actual "better" argument you have to address the aforementioned limitations
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wharvle 898 days ago
Something this doesn't do that DDG bangs do, is let me append it, or even stick it in the middle of a search. I can just type it wherever my cursor happens to be, other than in the middle of a term. This comes up when I search something in DDG then change my mind and want to use a bang.
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eviks 898 days ago
good point, and it's smart enough to ignore when quoted

Wish they also allowed changing the !prefix

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