You don't have to route all your searches through DDG to achieve that. https://support.mozilla.org/sv/kb/assign-shortcuts-search-en...

https://www.startpage.com/ works. DDG does not.

The thing i really like about bangs is that i can often just assume one exists, with zero setup, across all my devices. I don't search IMDB frequently enough to bother manually adding it in a menu somewhere, but on both desktop and mobile i can do `!imdb Brad Pitt` and get directly where I intended. It also works with less common sites, like I've been using `!stardew` lately to search the Stardew Valley Wiki directly.

The most I've had to do is search the bangs documentation if i can't find the search engine i want. (for Terraria stuff i sometimes wanted `!terrg` rather than `!terraria`, and ended up searching to find the former)

With a good search engine you would just omit the exclamation mark and type "imdb brad pitt" (without quotation marks) and the first result would be as good here: https://www.startpage.com/do/search?query=IMDB+Brad+Pitt

As here: https://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=brad%20pitt

No bangs needed.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=imdb+brad+pitt - the first link is to https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/

I can type 'ama' + enter and get Amazon instantly. If I need something on wikipedia I can just search for it and the wiki page will generally be in the top 10 results from Google. As for bing... I have never knowingly or consciously used it to search for something.

You are missing the point.

The point is that with DDG, you have a uniform syntax for searching multiple services that doesn't require any special cooperation from your browser or those services, doesn't require any setup apart from using DDG and only requires you to learn one new concept.

And this will work anywhere where webpages work (like, say, lynx), and will work consistently. There are thousands of !bangs, from things ranging from amazon, to wikipedia, to maps, to dictionary definitions... You aren't limited to a handful of hand picked services that your browser decided to support out of the box, or that you decided to manually configure.

Also, there is generally decent support to switch languages and regions for services that support it. For example, "!w" gets you "wikipedia", "!wsimple" gets you the "Simple English" version and "!wpt" gets you the Portuguese version.

IMHO, this is all extremely convenient.