Apparently !g is a thing though? I may have to give that a try so I can have the benefits of DDG, but the results of google.
And I've noticed lately that DuckDuckGo has gotten much better at short queries lately, at the expense of longer queries. Any query over about 4 words goes straight to Google.
A few of the ones I abuse constantly:
!g - google
!bi - bing image
!yt - youtube
!so - stackoverflow
!w - wikipedia
!py - python docs
The exhaustive list is here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
On Firefox I have
g - google
ddg - duckduckgo
yt - youtube
w - wikipedia
etc.
easy to type without the bang at the front (Google and Wikipedia are defaults, not sure what the other ones are). I gather on DDG you can use them at the end so you need the ! as a delimiter.
Also Stackoverflow's search and many other site searches are totally rubbish. Not a bit, but totally rubbish. Here's an example:
"!so c# read file" => this delivers useless results, the top result being "Reading Excel files from C#"
Compare that to "stackoverflow c# read file" on google, which delivers what you actually want, with the question "Reading From a Text File in C#".
What? It redirects your browser to Google, it's you doing the search, not any other entity. They don't proxy or anything.
I couldn't correct it because of HN's stupid 5-comment policy that applies to comments made in all threads combined, and couldn't edit the original comment with a correction as it had been more than an hour. :/
Setting DuckDuckGo as my default and using !s means I can search any of those sites without having to go to them first.
It takes a step out of the process.
Note that it works as either a prefix or a suffix - it might be easier to put the insertion point at the end of the text box.
If you're using Safari, you can use my Safari extension to do this with a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut: http://horizon-nigh.org/re-search/