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Sun 27 January 2019

Useful DuckDuckGo bangs

Posted by ankur in Tech (458 words, approximately a 2 minute read)


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If you haven't moved to DuckDuckGo yet, here's why you should consider it. I moved to it a while back, and I've not looked back since. In this post, I document some of the "bangs" that I use which make DuckDuckGo even nicer to use!

A "bang" is a search shortcut, like ones you can set up in Firefox and Chrome. Instead of navigating to the website to use their search box, bangs allow you to search via DuckDuckGo, and it redirects you to the search results on the website. So, apart from the obvious privacy advantage: DuckDuckGo uses the website search, not you, it also means you can search a plethora of websites right from DuckDuckGo. If you are used to using the Firefox search bar, for example, this becomes really handy.

General bangs

GIF showing the use of DuckDuckGo bangs to search Wikipedia.

I use a number of general bangs:

  • !bang to search for bangs.
  • !w to search Wikipedia
  • !g to use Google when I must.
  • !gmaps to search Google Maps.
  • !openstreetmap to search Open Street Maps.
  • !youtube to search Youtube.
  • !bbcw to search BBC weather.
  • !goodreads to search Goodreads.
  • !ox to search the Oxford dictionary.
  • !sauk to search Amazon UK (smile.amazon.uk).
  • !github to search Github.
  • !ctan to search CTAN.
  • !pypi to search PyPi.
  • !man to search man pages.

A few academic ones I use often are:

  • !gsc to search Google Scholar.
  • !arxiv to search ArXiv.
  • !pubmed to search PubMed

Addendum

There is, of course, a lmddgtfy service. Try: !lmddgtfy lmddgtfy. DuckDuckGo also provides an App for Android, and a widget that helps you search without having to open the browser first.

Bangs can be suggested, so please do suggest new bangs for other services that you use frequently.


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