Well, if your browser's set search engine is DDG, !bangs can be used in the address bar. They're just shortcuts to other search engines. For example, if you wanted to search for Matt Damon on IMDB, you'd just type "!imdb matt damon" in your address bar and it'll forward the "matt damon" query to IMDB's search.

More specifically, typing "!imdb matt damon" will simply forward you to the following link: https://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=matt%20damon

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More examples:

!a soap => https://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywo...

!hn duckduckgo => https://hn.algolia.com/?query=duckduckgo&type=story&dateRang...

> typing "!imdb matt damon" will simply forward you to the following link

In Safari, typing "imdb matt damon" and hitting the down arrow before enter gives me the same result. Do other browsers not have site search built-in? It will also pick up search fields on any site you browse you instead of requiring it to be added to some central repository.

And I use Spotlight for calculator and unit/currency conversions. Seems wasteful to roundtrip that kind of stuff online.

Too bad usually the general search engines are smarter than individual sites' search engines, I don't get how it's really useful than not having the bang.

I don't think Firefox on Android supports this. On Desktop it's quite useful for when you want to search a site you don't have a shortcut for. Guessing the shortcut has usually worked for me.

Also, when your search didn't give you what you were looking for, you can just prepend e.g. !g to search on Google, which for me is slightly faster than to copy the query, go to the address bar, enter "g" and then paste.

Android Firefox supports both keywords for bookmarks (with %s substitution in URL) and bang searches on DDG from the address bar. I'm happy to discover this today :D

Yes, and it sends the data to ddg, but they have tons of keywords ready to use. I usually set my most used keywords directly and let ddg take care of the rest, best of both worlds.

same. yes we save a few milliseconds with every query that we perform;)