Today I Learned @lemmy.world Keshara @lemmy.world 4d ago

TIL that in DuckDuckGo !g in front of your previous search will run it in Google

So til that if you use DuckDuckGo search engine, and you're not happy with the result and want to run the previous search through Google, instead of copying your search, then heading to Google, then pasting your previous search, you can just add !g to front of your search in DuckDuckGo and that will auto direct you to Google and run that search for you!

For example: !g search term for Google

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They're called bangs. :)

https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
- Its amazing, I work in the IT industry, I love exploring different areas of tech, but the concept of bangs in a search engine has never come up haha. I've seen not ever really used them in a terminal when forgetting to run a command as sudo
  
  There's also searXNG (https://docs.searxng.org/ which is a customisable search. I like to use Paulgo.io.
  
  Firefox also allows to make them for different search fields, e.g. if I write pic and then my querry, it brings me images.google.com results. Kinda nice if bangs don't cover your usecases.
- Awesome! I just have made my contribution sending a new bang :D
- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vqmy5qrvaVQ
Bangs are great.

My favorites are:

!w for Wikipedia

!d for a Dictionary

!t for a Thesaurus

!yt for YouTube

!archiveweb for the Internet Archive

and I've found it usually works with pretty much any site name you're thinking of searching (e.g. if you want to look up a movie on IMDB, chances are !imdb will take you there.)
- You forgot the most important one
  
  !aw for Arch Wiki
- This is just one of multiple bangs for the Internet Archive, and probably more intuitive and quick ones include:
  
  !ia for the Internet Archive generally
  
  !wbm for the Wayback Machine
  
  oh, thanks, that'll make it way quicker for me to type out!
- !wa for Wolfram Alpha and !aw for the Arch Wiki as well!
- The dictionary bang is 100% something I'll be using quite often moving forward
- !ud Urban Dictionary
  
  !startrek Star Trek wiki
  
  !stargate Stargate wiki
  
  !wayback Wayback Machine
  
  !tineye Reverse image search
  
  !bang Check if there are any DuckDuckGo bangs for a particular site
  
  !itad Is There Any Deal?
  
  !steam Steam store
  
  !sp Startpage
  
  You can also use a bang itself, with nothing else before or after it, to just go to the homepage for that website. That can be simpler than typing out the whole URL.
But why would I want a bunch of ads and SEO shit that doesn't answer my question?
Using DDG to route into Google defeats the point of avoiding Google in the first place.

Use !sp instead to route your search through Startpage, which is essentially Google without the Google BS.
- DuckDuckGo is an alright default but sometimes I just need that better, more tailored search from Google.
  
  Nowadays I often use AI for questions though. It gives better results and a more comfortable way.
- I hear you, but sometimes when I'm working I want 2 things when trying to solve a problem quickly; 1. Accurate results, and 2. Speed and performance.
  
  So while I do use SP on occasion, I find that sometimes for me it can take a while to load the results and just generally get a bit laggy. This can really start to annoy me over the course of a day, it's those moments when I just bite the bullet and go to Google directly if DuckDuckGo isn't giving me what I need
- Only needed for about 2% of my queries. So definitely doesn't defeat the purpose if 98% of my queries don't leak out to google.
- it used to be a great way to get google results that weren't custom. then in 2019 google disabled that api
!Arch - The Archlinux wiki, btw
Wanna search on “google” without selling your data to google.

Well just like duckduckgo is basically bing but with trackers removed, startpage https://startpage.com/ is the same for google!
https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
- I'm going to route all my searches through !bbqpb - the BBQ Pit Boys
Bangs also work on Kagi.
That feature to search a multitude of websites via Duck Duck Go was a gamechanger when I found out about it some years ago. I've not gone back since.
Or g! Or at the end.

Also w! for wikipedia.

I think there's a few more.
- A few more, yes. More than 13.5 thousand more.
  
  https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
This works in Brave search too, at the beginning or at the end of the query string. There are 12474 bangs available as of the moment of writing this comment (!). I believe all of those work on DDG too.
- Have the search results on Brave Search improved? I tried it a few months after they launched it and found the results terrible
  
  I switched to it from DDG which I found was enshittifying lately, but to be honest I don't really like it that much, just gave a bit better results than DDGs and has bangs, but the AI thing is absolute BS and there's no way to disable it without saving cookies on your browser.
  
  Now that I look at startpage again I'm thinking to give it another try but am not sure if it has bangs too and if you can set settings in their GET method as you can with DDG.
Huh. Did not know that.

But also why?! If I thought that Google search would be more effective I just would have used Google to begin with.
Works in brave too!

I use !gi a lot because brave image search sucks lol
Or use !()startpage for more private search using google's results. Sadly it's much more typing.

Edit: there's !s bang, it's as short as !g
- According to another comment !sp is a shorter version of same
- Or just use Startpage.com directly

40 comments