Search operator for site filtering via existing bang shortcuts (bongs!)

CatX

If this proposal ends up in Kagi, some means of escaping the @-character would be useful.

Examples:

\@w should literally search for @w.
Searches like user@domain should not trigger this system.

Searches should behave like normal and not trigger this system unless the query matches something similar to the following regular expression (note the requirement of a space):
^.+ @[a-zA-Z0-9]+$

Edits: Trying to get the text formatting right.

tuesday

CatX Certainly agree with the space requirement! That’s how ! works and I would certainly expect them to behave the same.

However as Kagi currently stands, I don’t think searching for @w or even "@w" searches for the symbol — the first result is the wikipedia page for the letter W, which doesn’t contain any instances of @ at all. (and ditto for !)

mackid1993

It may be cool to integrate this with lenses. Like @lens to trigger a search within a specific lens in addition to a site.

Vlad

mackid1993 Can you expand on this - what does it exactly do?

Vlad

tuesday How would this be called (and it is not a 'bong')?

tuesday

Vlad I guess you could call it a bong! I wasn’t thinking it would need a name (other search operators don’t, like subtraction/exclusion) but just as long as you don’t call it “bung” I’ll be happy lol

In terms of discovery (which you mentioned on Discord), I’d put it in the same category as the standalone ! — not a DDG original bang feature, but part of how it’s implemented in Kagi, and mentioned as an option on any page bangs are mentioned.

Syx

Not every site has a way to search via url.com/search=query.

It will be nice to enable query !url custom bang to just do a kagi search of query site:url.com.

CrunchyFritos

Interesting idea. I could see the use for this as well.

Vlad

If everyone agrees we should call this bongs and that it works like bangs, just gets the target domain and performs a site search on it, I think we can push this through to implementation.

CrunchyFritos

Vlad Why not just call it "at" since it's an "at" operator just like "!" is a bang operator?

Or you could also call them "Site Bangs" and make that the title of the relevant section in the Bang documentation analogous to the "Quick Bangs" and "Custom Bangs" section titles.

Vlad

CrunchyFritos Site bangs is too similar. And it does not lend itself well to spoken use as you end up with 'ats'.

Sectimus

You can actually do this already if you create a custom bang (https://kagi.com/settings?p=custom_bangs) and use Kagi as the URL. I think the Reddit search is terrible, so prefer to have a search on Kagi for Reddit results.

my query !r

can be banged to search for:

my query site:reddit.com

Enable it in the list of quick bangs to search Reddit by adding just one character to the end.

My custom bang options
Search engine name: Reddit with Kagi
URL: https://kagi.com/search?q=%s+site:reddit.com
Bang shortcut: r
URL Encode Query: ON

CrunchyFritos

Sectimus Clever workaround. Maybe this can just be added to the documentation for bangs instead of creating bongs? Seems like a simpler solution for what is likely a power user feature anyway.

tuesday

CrunchyFritos How is a multi-step process for every single bang you anticipate using this for “simpler” than changing ! to @ ?

I actually already had two of these workaround custom bangs set up when I suggested this feature, and I still look forward to it! 🙂

CrunchyFritos

tuesday Fair. I was thinking more from the side of avoiding feature bloat. Adding a Site Bang isn't much more complex than creating a custom bang if all it takes is making a bang for e.g. "https://kagi.com/search?q=%s+site:reddit.com". Unless I'm missing something obvious, all the user needs to do is change the site at the end and the feature is implemented?

tuesday

CrunchyFritos I foresee this as being a feature I would want to use spontaneously—yes, I would set it up for Wikipedia and Reddit, but there are lots of other sites I only use occasionally that wouldn’t be worth the effort of setting something like this up (but using a “bong” would be quicker than typing out “site:something.com”).

On top of this, there’s the fact that I want to have the option of searching via Kagi or the website itself, and while it’s possible to set up custom bangs with different names for each of them (e.g. !r and !rkagi) that adds further complexity.

CrunchyFritos

tuesday Ah, gotcha. Makes sense. Being able to use a bong instead of a bang for any existing bang shortcut is significantly different than having to custom make a site bang for each use case. My mistake for misunderstanding that.

GravityMan

Some way to toggle between either a bang and searching the web since the former relies on the site’s search capabilities. Example for a bang would be !imdb Deadpool vs Deadpool site:IMDb.com

I have dual searches setup for those without bangs as well, say https://forums.plex.tv/search?q=%s for the Plex forums directly and another for https://kagi.com/search?q=%s+site:forums.plex.tv.

Usually the latter returns more/better results than the former. Bangs are only as decent as the direct site’s internal search.

Usually bangs are great for going to directly/near what you need but if there’s any variation, they become less and less useful. Having a way to toggle them into an “integrated bang” would be nice, like the Plex forums about. Say !pf directly for the Plex forums and !pfk for a web search of the site.

Vlad

GravityMan We discussed this and decided that @[bang] would be a nice way to invoke this.

Question for you, how would users discover this?