Search the internet like a ninja with DuckDuckGo bangs!
February 27, 2020•703 words
duckduckgo might just be my favourite search engine... because you can search almost everything!
It has a very powerful feature called bangs!
I recommend you set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine. This enables you to directly search many websites or search engines directly from your address bar.
(You can also get the 'duckduckgo' app for your phone, and these will work there too.)
For example, if you want to find cat videos on YouTube; instead of typing youtube.com into your address bar, loading the front page of youtube (with all its adverts etc) then typing your query 'funny cats' into the search bar on Youtube.... blah blah... so many steps.
Instead, you simply type this into your address bar:
!yt funny cats
There are over 13,000 of these 'bangs!', for many different websites. Yes, it takes a little getting used to, but you will save A LOT of time over years.
Here are a few choice samples. I try to avoid the obvious ones, with huge privacy concerns, and offer good alternatives depending on the type of search you are gonna do.
I put the ones I use most often in bold.
(You can find more at: https://duckduckgo.com/bang)
General searches (aka metasearch engines):
While you could just use DDG directly, you can also search using other engines using bangs. There are many different search engines out there in the wild, but most use the same 2 or 3 'crawlers/indexers' made by the big players (Google/Bing etc.). Alternatives exist, and different engines can give different results (and muddies your footprints) so try to mix your usage.
Escape the filter bubble!
| bang | Description |
| If you don't use a !bang you just get DuckDuckGo results. The results are from Bing, but with strong privacy. | |
| !sp | Google results, but through StartPage engine. Same results, better (but not complete) privacy. Don't rely on this alone, as Google censor/prioritise results. It also has a unique feature called 'anonymous view' to allow you to open a search result through their proxy, protecting your IP from the website you visit. |
| !qw | Qwant. It has it's own indexes/webcrawler so you will get unique results. |
| !mojeek | Stupid name, but has its own index. You will get unique results not found in other engines. |
| !swisscows | Results from Bing (same as DuckDuckGo) but has a unique way of showing results |
| !sptio | SearX engine, an open source project. It combines a few different search engines into one. Has a good 'files' section for torrents. |
| !gib | Gibiru. Stupid name. Claims to be completely uncensored, so good luck out there and avoid risky clicks. |
| !yan | Yandex. One of the few sites with its own (huge) index, and a good one at that. Also it won't be subject to same restrictions the USA put on Google and Bing results. WARNING: Subject to dragnet survelience by Russian Intelligence - probably not a concern (if you are not Russian) but use a VPN/Proxy, control your cookies, and don't sign in to Yandex account. |
| !giga | Gigablast. Old, ugly and way behind the competition. Only mentioned here as its one of the few site with its own (small) index, which makes it awesome. |
| !pk | Peekier. Shows previews of all results as tiled webpages. |
Specialist searches:
| bang | Description | Example(s) |
| !i | image search by duckduckgo, same results as Bing, which are better than Google but with no tracking | !i sunset |
| !maps (or !m) | google maps. WARNING: you WILL be tracked by Google, but have to admit that Google still has the best map and directions result for now... | !maps amuda to erbil !maps macdonalds moscow |
| !invd | Search Invidious (a privacy focussed front-end of Youtube). If you insist on actual youtube, you can use !yt instead. | |
| !w | wikipedia | |
| !tw | searches twitter | |
| !qwn | One of many news !bangs. Qwant are impartial, so can be trusted not to censor. | !qwn coronavirus |
| !wa | wolfram alpha. a very powerful calculator that understands natural langauge. | !wa solve 8x + 6 = 15x -8 !wa days until 31 December 2020 |
| !owm | Open Weather Map. There are plenty of weather related !bangs, this one seems good. | !owm kathmandu |
| !u | urban dictionary. | |
| !mc | metacritic, for aggregated reviews of films/shows/games... etc | !mc the walking dead |
| !r | reddit, searches all of reddit.com | |
| !rt | rotten tomatoes | !rt mr robot |
| !imdb | Internet Movie Database | |
| !t | thesaurus | |
| !a | searches amazon. also variations of this exist, for your national store (e.g. !auk search amazon.co.uk) | |
| !ebay | searches amazon. also variations of this exist, for your national store (e.g. !ebayuk search ebay.co.uk) | |
| !bang | search for more bangs! e.g. !band news to list all bangs! that related to news sources | !bang news |