Search Bangs to the Rescue! 🔍

I find myself in a world where online content lies guarded behind gates of ad-infested websites. Today's process of looking up information isn't all that straightforward. While you would assume that the human experience matters most, much rather, search on the web is optimised for search machines (what a life) in an attempt to lure curious users into ad traps. Like a piece of cheese to be placed in a mouse trap, content is planted maliciously for users to get captured. It's no wonder that so many, when searching on the web these days, add "reddit" to the end of search terms as a consequence. What users actually want are real opinions written by real people (this will become more important in a moment). Search is broken indeed.

On top of that, I find myself in a world, where more and more people tend to replace searching the web (or googling as some like to call it—I don't) altogether with asking an AI chatbot. The problem with that, of course, is that the information retrieved from such an interaction has a tendency to be untruthful. Hallucination still is one of the biggest flaws of AI and I would never put all my faith into the output of an AI chatbot.

There's yet another world I find myself in these days: a world full of feeds. In between content you'd actually want to see, they are filled with ads, deep fakes, AI slop, agitating news and addictive content tailored to your likes. Except for my beloved RSS feeds of fellow bloggers (and—maybe—my podcast feeds), I want to stay away from feeds as much as I can.

The good news is that I have found a sweet solution for all three of these situations: Search Bangs! Bangs are a search-machine feature that was first introduced by DuckDuckGo but I recently found out that Kagi has them too. They are shortcuts that let you search directly on particular web sites by using an exclamation mark (!) followed by a platform-specific key word and the actual search term.

Here's some examples:

• !w eel: Search Wikipedia for Eels (they are interesting!).
• !r encrypt hard drive linux: Search Reddit for whether it's a good idea to encrypt your hard drive on Linux (according to my research you could).
• !yt how to play taiwanese mahjong: I should finally learn how to play mahjong and impress the Taiwanese when I travel there again soon (yes, soon).

There's even more Bangs, but most often I use them for Wikipedia (mostly to find truth), for Reddit (mostly for honest travel tips and sometimes Linux-related advice) and for YouTube (mostly to avoid the damn feed that's been trained by an algorithm for two decades and by now knows me too damn well).

Search away, everyone. Search Bangs to the rescue!