Monday, February 13, 2012

DuckDuckGo’s Bang Syntax

Clif Reeder (via Hacker News):

The way that DDG does this is by trading off text directives for GUI/mouse interactions. Assuming you can type faster than move and click a cursor, this is a big difference. To me, its like the difference between using Vim and a GUI based text editor.

DDG calls this the bang syntax. What it allows you to do is pipe your search directly to another site’s search - for example, Amazon, Wikipedia, Google Image Search, or hundreds of other places.

I use LaunchBar search templates for this, but I can see how it might be handy when not searching from my Mac. I gave DuckDuckGo a try but went back to Google because the results seemed to be much better.

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