In praise of the small things in life: DDG Bangs!

Published Nov 12, 2025

DuckDuckGo is a privacy-respecting search engine launched in 2008 that has been slowly expanding into something else truly. (I mean, come on, Identity Theft Restoration?). Well, nevertheless, I still use DuckDuckGo because it’s easy, their search results aren’t polluted with all sorts of nonsense, they did introduce an AI summarize feature but I don’t use it and it’s easy to opt out thankfully. But all of that pales in comparison to the best DDG feature, Bangs!

Bangs are… well it’s kinda hard to describe them, it’s basically a shortcut from your search engine to wherever else, so if you have DuckDuckGo set as your search engine, you can basically search using other search engines quite easily!

“!webmd pancreatitis” will search for the term “pancreatitis” in webmd
“!wdk Morgenmad” will search for the term “Morgenmad” (breakfast) in Danish language Wikipedia.
Wanna know how RSA works, but simplified? “!wsimple RSA” for the RSA article in Simple English language Wikipedia

You don’t have to put the “bang” before your term, you can either search “cute cat pictures !f” or “!f cute cat pictures”, and you’ll still get to see the feline delight alive. As of writing, there are more than 13 thousand bangs, for all sorts of websites, here are some I commonly use, as well as some that are quite interesting.

!gh for Github, helps when looking for code, although this does sometimes give me a “Rate Limit" error. (It helps to log in with an account, this avoids rate limiting errors)
!lxml for searching the Linux Kernel Mailing Lists. (Through MARC)
!bsdman for FreeBSD Manual Pages.
!mlp for searching through the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fandom Wiki.
!hmiku for searching through the Hatsune Miku Wiki
!xkcd for searching xkcd by site contents. (Basically just “YOUR SEARCH + site:xkcd.com”) or !xkcdn followed by a number to land on the xkcd comic for that number.

Note: You can also just search “xkcd” followed by a number for a comic and you’ll get a nice little section showing the comic with convenient links for explaining it, going forward or backwards.
!ia for searching the Internet Archive or !wbm for searching the Wayback Machine. Quite helpful!
If you’re learning Japanese, then you can easily search Jisho.org with either !ji or !jisho
Interested in the demoscene… scene for the Commodore 64? Well you can search for them right from your search bar through !csdb

Well, I think I’ve made my point and there’s no need to highlight anymore. There are a lot, and you can submit your own if you’d like! This is such a good feature that I think it justifies using DuckDuckGo (if the better privacy and cleaner results haven’t won you over already), for me, it makes searching way more convenient cause I am only one step away from searching my favorite sites.

Oh, and also, if you dislike DuckDuckGo’s search results, then you can also simply search the same but with Google using “!g”