DuckDuckGo Bang Searches

If you’re a DuckDuckGo user—and you really should be unless you like having your search history logged and sold—there’s a very nice shortcut you can use when searching specific sites. Suppose, for example, you want to find the documentation for the Common Lisp mapc function. You just type

!lisp mapc

into the url bar and DuckDuckGo takes you right to the proper page on LispDoc. If you want to know the French word for left, you type

!cenfr left

and DuckDuckGo takes you to the translations for left in the Collins English-French Dictionary.

There are over six thousand sites that have a shortcut and the hardest part of using the shortcuts is deciding which ones to remember. Most of the common ones are pretty obvious lightening that load a bit. I just learned this trick and already love it. I probably will use it only for the few reference sites that I visit regularly but even that’s a big win.

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