Every time I see someone laud ddg's !bang searches, I ask myself, "What makes managing your browser's configuration so damn hard?" I go to Chrome's "settings", I click "Manage Search Engines", and I update the keyword. Why is this so hard for some people?

You can use keyword searches to get the !bang functionality directly in your browser for any search engine of your choice. There's no need to go through DuckDuckGo.

I've switched full time to DDG for a couple months now, and have rarely ever used !g to Google results because I was unsatisfied with the DDG results. I'm curious what the criticisms of DDG's search results are. It's clear to me that many people prefer Google over DDG, but it's unclear why. What is the standard that the search results are being held up to?

Small suggestion: You should give focus to the text area when the user lands on the page, so I can instantly search and not have to reach for the mouse or tab.

This is great! I've tried to adopt DDG but in the end I'm finding myself prefacing everything with !g -- to the point where I will type it for other engines.

Nice work!

Shouldn't this be really easy to create using a Chrome/Greasemonkey extension or something similar? I mean, all you have to do is automatically preface every query with "!g" (after passing through a regex to filter out the other !bang queries).

That way no tertiary server would be needed, which would probably improve the response times (and cost less...)

Nifty idea. I'm having a hard time setting it as default search for Firefox though.

I followed the instructions to "Add a keyword for this search"...but I'm not really sure how to make it default? I don't see it anywhere under the searchbar dropdown ("Manage Search Extensions") and don't see anything under the general options.

I wrote this a while ago (July last year) as http://goosegoosego.com whose source code is available at https://gist.github.com/1113894

You missed a spot in your handling of bang syntax, DuckDuckGo allows you to use either "\", "! " or "!ducky " to find the first result, you don't handle "\".

At the time I also sent Gabriel Weinberg an couple of E-Mails about it saying I'd love to have it be made redundant by DuckDuckGo itself, but it's not a feature he's interested in pursuing:

    > > > On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 6:41 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
    > > > I implemented a wrapper around DuckDuckGo and Google and stuck it on
    > > > goosegoosego.com
    > > >
    > > > I got tired of always prefixing my normal queries with "!g", and not
    > > > having "! " work the way I wanted.
    > > >
    > > On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 12:47, Gabriel Weinberg <yegg@duckduckgo.com> wrote:
    > > > Hah, nice :)
    > > > Gabriel, http://ye.gg/
    >
    > Needless to say I'd be delighted if some option to duckduckgo.com
    > would make this redundant.
    >
    > One flaw in it is that if you e.g. search for "!mysql" it'll redirect
    > to duck-duck-go, which'll do a "site:mysql.com" search an DDG.
    >
    > I'd like it to do a "site:" search on Google instead, but that would
    > require me to compile a list of all the bang operators that result in
    > site: queries, which would make the code a bit more complex than it
    > currently is.
    >
    > It would be great if you could pass some GET parameter to DDG to make
    > it emulate GooseGooseGo's behavior, e.g.:
    >
    >     http://duckduckgo.com/?dse=google&q=foobar
    >
    > dse = Default Search Engine.
    >
    > Then you could also make it prefer Bing, Yahoo etc.

    Duly noted, but not sure about doing that. Alternatively, you can
    use the 0-click api at http://api.duckduckgo.com/, which returns
    bang redirects and then you can just do a substitution if you see
    that.

    Gabriel, http://ye.gg/

Also, to anyone using DuckDuckGoog or my GooseGooseGo you should be aware that you're trusting some (other) random dudes on the internet with your searches, I don't log anything with GooseGooseGo (no access or error logs), but you only have my word for that.

You can expose some sensitive information via your searches, and that's a reason why many people use DuckDuckGo in the first place even though their results aren't always up to par with Google's.

God, do we really need a whole website for this? All it does is redirect to another site.

This looks interesting, but I find myself missing Google’s search suggestions. Does anyone know a way to enable them for this search engine? (I’m on Firefox.)

I see somebody hosts a “Duck Duck Go + Google Suggest” plugin and proxy server at http://nfriedly.com:81/. If there isn’t already a search plugin like I’m looking for, I think the easiest way to make it would be to just change the search URL (and name and icon) for that plugin. Does anyone know how to do that?

This would be a weird place to stop for someone trying to minimize their time executing searches and clicking.

Having to navigate to the browser to launch a search for MDN Arrays from Vim is suboptimal. Alfred (OSX) is the best solution I can come up with. "lucky <query>" pulls the browser up with its Google Feeling Lucky result. I've shortened it to just "l <query>". You can add custom searches with a syntax like "example.com/whatever/{query}".

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I don't get what is so great about DuckDuckGo's bang syntax. Whenever I want to search Wikipedia, I simply go in Chrome's address bar and type "w<tab>".

Google is "g<tab>".

Hacker News is "h<tab>".

DuckDuckGo is "d<tab>".

This all works out of the box with no manual configuration given that you have used those search engines in the past. Is there something I am missing?

Great, exactly what I want, although it probably doesn't need to go through DDG it works perfectly fine. Google will let me load up the add as search engine dialogue but won't let me press okay to add it.

Awesome. I think this is the perfect solution for those users 'on the fence' about switching to DuckDuckGo. You can send them this link and say, look - its Google but now you get benefits of DDG too.

Why not type: ama <tab> = search amazon in chrome

I really like the search suggestions.

You mean other browsers don't allow you to create search shortcuts?

eg "a blah" for amazon, "w blah" for wikipedia "s blah" for stackoverflow?

- says a long time Opera users