this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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Just add Wikipedia to your search bar
Use the DDG bang :
!w <your-search-here>There are bangs for "image search" (!im), "github search" (!gh), "search PubMed" (!pm)
You cannot live without this
Why would I need any of that if I can bang the search bar of my browser instead, and it takes me straight to search on Wikipedia or any other site I want without waiting for DDG to add that site?
Relieved to find this response below the others. Why TF would you search for a site i) whose URL you know? ii) waste space on your browser by adding the website as a search bar on your browser's menu bar? How much time do people anticipate they'll save by avoiding typing Wikipedia.org into the address field?
Wikipedia I would never do this for, but site:reddit.com or even just adding the word Reddit to the end of my search term has been my trick to finding good information for like 15 years now. It's more useful now than ever, despite how shitty reddit has gotten. Reddit's search is terrible though and searching the same thing using Reddit's search rarely gives good results.
Most (if not all) modern browsers support multiple search engines which are configurable and selectable from a dropdown in the omnibar. There's no need to remember dozens of shortcuts or add a dedicated toolbar anymore.
TBF the dropdown usually requires fiddling with the mouse, while keywords for search engines allow sticking with the keyboard. Since I use the sites regularly, it's no problem for me to remember the keywords.
Any one of these methods is better than going to the site front page each time.
Yeah, fair enough. If it works, it works, and to each their own.
The suggestion from the user I replied to, of needing a browser toolbar, did get in my craw a bit. Like what is it 2005? I don't think I've even used one since before Chrome was in beta.
Yeah that was weird, idk when that person last looked at their options regarding search.
That's not what I mean. I have a keyword like ‘wik’ set to take me to Wikipedia's search, and if I type ‘wik black pus’, i get the page for that term.
I also have an extension that shows a popup with buttons for different search engines whenever I select text on a page, and I have a similar thing on the phone for text shared from any app. Each of these methods has about twenty-seven sites configured in it. Considering that I look up things on these sites easily a dozen times a day, it's ridiculous to say that this doesn't save me time over opening each site.
(P.S.: This workflow also allows using the keyboard for keyword-triggered search, while the search interface on some sites is getting less accommodating and assumes me mousing around.)
if that's working, it means your browser search bar is configured to route thru DDG
That's not how any of this works. The browser has its own list of search engines. Seriously, look in the settings sometimes.
Firefox even has two separate mechanisms for this, the second is via bookmarks with keywords.
You can completely skip DDG's systems by just using your search bar though.
I know I speak for everyone on Lemmy that they prefer entering their question into Grok.
Grok told me that white people are being erased when I asked for a recipe for pancakes.
We can probably live without Bing
I want them all to exist, it gives searXNG more hits to eliminate ads.
searXNG, find bob's bugers
What do they all agree on? Give it back to the user.