DuckDuckGo’s bangs (extremely useful) let you search a specific website. For example, on Wiktionary, searching !wt hello will return the Wiktionary entry for ‘hello’ (or, if the entry for ‘hello’ didn’t exist, a list of search results).
However, this 1) takes longer as it has to go through DuckDuckGo, 2) could even take you to a separate container depending on how you have that set up, and 3) is inherently less private because it’s being sent through a middleman.
It’s super easy to make your own custom keyword in Firefox at Settings > Search > Search Shortcuts. Using Wiktionary as an example again, I made the keyword !wt, mirroring the DDG bang. From there, I just searched some random bullshit string that didn’t exist, found the URL https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=parametershere, stripped it to https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search, and appended %s at the end as a specifier character that gets replaced with whatever the search terms are.
Thus, now !wt hello takes me straight to https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=hello, which in turn goes right to the entry, instead of DDG –> Wiktionary search –> Wiktionary entry.
Why YSK: This is extremely obvious in hindsight, but even though I use bangs all the time, I never connected that I could just replace Firefox’s keywords with the exact bangs I was already using for an objectively better experience. Bangs already make things way more convenient, and this is a more perfect form of that for commonly used websites.
Edit: I forgot to mention that, in the ‘Advanced’ options for a search shortcut, you can add search suggestions. So Wikipedia, for example, has the OpenAPI where you can get suggestions while you type (if that’s your thing): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search= and append %s.
I’ve been using bangs for a while, and I never thought of this myself! I’ll definitely start doing this.
Do you know of a good way to sync/export&import these keywords that does not involve the Firefox account thing?
Somebody at my last job showed me how to do this to speed up searching within internal tools at work. It’s only saving a few seconds and a few clicks, but it blows people away every time.
I’ve got a ton of them now.
If I’m trying to juggle several pieces of information and/or tasks in my mind at once, those saved seconds are worth waaaay more than the sum of the time they add up to.
One of the reasons I was able to switch to Duck Duck Go as my primary search was because I could just type “g (subject)” to search Google instead. Firefox keywords are great.
Those seconds add up! And the ergonomics are worth it even if the time savings are marginal.
Theo wrote something to do this I recall
