First I would like to say that my previous blog post got way more attention than I was expecting, thanks every one for commenting and sharing!
Since about a month I have switched to DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine on my phone and laptop and overall I have been very pleased with it. Of course I am also a fan of the build in dark theme.
Google is currently the biggest search engine, because of their advanced algorithms they seem to always provide the best search results. This has been the case for a very long time but I think (for me) the time is now to switch to an alternative, DuckDuckGo is growing very fast and their search results are improving.
I have tried it in the past but wasn't pleased with the search results so quickly switched back to Google. Since then DuckDuckGo has improved a lot and have also build in more features, for example a build in calculator.
DuckDuckGo has greatly improved over the last couple of years but still there is room for improvement. For me when I search dev related questions or issues I am not always pleased with the results, in this case Google did provide with better results for me.
But still I am not going to run back to Google because of this. I found a very useful feature from DuckDuckGo that not only could help you get better search results but can also increase search speed in general.
Here comes the !Bang, DuckDuckGo !Bang are shortcuts that let you target searches on specific sites. And if DuckDuckGo is you browser default search engine you can use it directly from your address bar.
To use a bang it is actually very easy, for example you can search on DEV with this bang: !devto glennmen
Thanks to all the lovely comments in my previous blog post I was able to make a list here of interesting bangs that I hope can help you.
General searching:
-
DEV:
!devto -
Stack Overflow:
!so -
DevDocs:
!dd -
Hacker Noon:
!hno -
Medium:
!medium - If you ever want to do a search on Google:
!g
Web related:
-
MDN Web Docs:
!mdn -
Can I use...:
!caniuse -
CSS-Tricks:
!csst -
npm:
!npm -
cdnjs:
!cdnjs
Android:
-
Android Developers:
!android -
The Android Arsenal:
!andar
PHP:
Ruby:
This is only small portion of the available bangs, there currently are over 12.000 bangs so check them out. They have shortcuts for all kinds of websites.
For more information about DuckDuckGo bangs and what bangs there are available check out their website.
If there are any useful websites missing you can also submit your own bangs to be included in their list: https://duckduckgo.com/newbang
Oldest comments (5)
Wow,that is such a helpful tip!
I am using DuckDuckGo for some months now and was seriously considering switching back to google because the results are just not as good - especially in dev relaeted searches, as you mentioned.
Now I can give it another try. Thank you!
I love to hear that! Being able to help you really makes me happy.
I accidentally came across DDG !bang and thought this was useful to share, I think DDG needs to spread this out more.
I absolutely agree with you!
Doesn't DDG use anonymized Google search? Remember the founder saying so in quora
It might have been so in the past but not anymore from what I can tell here: help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-hel...
Also described here in an old forum post it seems that DDG gets it sources from different sites (Bing/Yahoo): duck.co/forum/thread/2955/how-to-s...