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DuckDuckGo bangs are great but they have two limitations because they are universal to all DDG users:

  1. I'm forced to use the bang abbreviation that DDG has decided on, even if I don't like it. E.g. I often use justwatch.com.au search, the DDG bang is !justwatchau, which is long and annoying to type. I'd rather just use !j (which currently maps to Walmart search and I have no use for)
  2. There's no way to create a bang for a private site like a members-only forum or an intranet

You could take advantage of the fact the DDG requires logins by allowing users to create personalised bangs that override the DDG defaults but otherwise work exactly the same as DDG bangs.

  • Vlad replied to this.

    riddley We have been considering this in the past. How do you imagine this working in the settings?

        riddley The two features are nothing alike, or at least I do not see what you see. Can you spend some time thinking through this?

            That's exactly what I was thinking of 😃

              19 days later

              being able to use custom bangs, by giving our own query urls (e.g https://mysite.com/search?q=%s). Google chrome has something similar to this to add custom search engines

                Merged 1 post from Custom bangs.
                  5 days later

                  !g is really strong in my muscle memory, so I keep ending up on the site I wanted to get away from. It's like a toxic relationship.

                  I'd love a setting that behaves like sl in the terminal. Just give me some negative reinforcement when I use !g.

                  • Perhaps it could rick roll me?
                  • Send me to prehistoric Google?
                  • Block Kagi until I type "I will not use !g again. I will not use !g again." and so on 20 times?
                  • Add a 10-second delay before redirecting so I can reflect on my shortcomings?

                    @insomnia-creator Nice, there are custom scripts as well as custom CSS? Or do you mean userscripts like tamper monkey? I've written a few but not sure how I'd write one to catch that from Firefox's location bar.

                      We have discussed adding a feature for enabling users to add custom bangs.

                      I think if you wanted this, you could simply create a bang that would override the stock !g to just go back to Kagi, or something else.

                        insomnia-creator This is what custom scripts are for.

                        But this assumes users have the knowledge to write the script.

                            z64

                            Exactly! But the things the suggestion is too wacky for it to be a mainstream features.

                            The 'punishments' are for custom scripts.

                            Everything else is for custom bangs.

                                Merged 7 posts from Punish users for using !g (opt-in).
                                  4 months later

                                  I have something tangentially related, I often work with Julia (a programming language), and would like to use !jl to search the docs. However, this leads me to search John Lewis. Having personalised bangs with ability to overwrite the default would allow me to change to something more suitable for me.