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A faster way of surfing the internet: !bangs
Search any search engine with speed
A handful of months ago, I learned of a neat new trick for surfing the internet, one which seems so obvious in retrospect. I learned how to browse using bangs.
Besides the obvious advantages of privacy and integrity, another reason to set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine is that you gain quick access to over 13,000 bangs. A bang is a shortcut that takes you directly to the search results of a different website. Let me illustrate it with an example.
Let’s say you want to read the Wikipedia entry for “World Wide Web.” There are a few ways of reaching this page. You could go to https://en.wikipedia.org and enter the text “World Wide Web” into the search bar. You could also do a google search for “World Wide Web Wikipedia” and click on the top result. Both of these methods require a minimum of two clicks and two pages that need to load from a server. Bangs reduce this search to a single query.
If you have DuckDuckGo as your browser’s default search engine, you can simply type “!w World Wide Web” into the address bar, and your browser will take you straight to the Wikipedia page for the World Wide Web.
!w world wide web
