[calebmpeterson]

For what it's worth, you weren't the only one with that initial reaction.

I remained woefully ignorant of DDG until Spring of this year (no clue how, I just missed it), but once discovering it, my definition of a good search tool has been forever changed by a single character.

The ! (bang).

!walmart, !netflix, !.net, !clojure, !java, ...

!weatherspark (huh, it's not there, I'll submit that, now anyone can !weatherspark)

The ! means DDG is my single-point search engine for almost any site imaginable. And it uses that site's search feature instead of a naive textual scrape (a la Google).

[nostrademons]

The Chrome Omnibox tends to fill that role for me. If I type "cloj" and hit the down arrow twice in Chrome, it takes me straight to clojure.org. And it's integrated with my history - once I've done it, if I type "cl" and hit return, I go straight back.

[spullara]

Amazingly this feature is still in yahoo search in the form of search shortcuts.

http://search.yahoo.com/osc/help#readyshortcuts

[yk]

You forgot !g (google search). That is at least the shortcut I think is most important. With it, DDG is always at least as good as google, while it provides a better interface.

[calebmpeterson]

I didn't even know that one; thank you!