I have been using DuckDuckGo for several years now. Recently I was talking to a friend about this, and she explained that while she likes the idea of DuckDuckGo, she still thinks she would occasionally need Google. “Then just bang Google,” I responded, and she looked at me like I just got off a spaceship.

A lot of people are not familiar with the concept of DuckDuckGo bangs. Bangs are just a series of shortcuts that DuckDuckGo added to its search bar, making it easy for you to search on specific domains. For instance, “!g MacSparky” in the DuckDuckGo search bar searches MacSparky through the Google search engine, anonymized. Here are a few that I use all the time:

!g – Google
!a – Amazon
!w – Wikipedia
!YouTube or !watch – YouTube
!reddit – Reddit
!yelp – Yelp
!imdb – IMDB
!apple – Apple
!appledev – Developer.Apple
!maps – Google Maps
!applemaps – Apple Maps
!archived – wayback machine

According to the DuckDuckGo website, there are currently 13,505 bangs. If you would like to switch to an Internet search engine that’s not quite so creepy, DuckDuckGo is the answer, and a few bangs in your pocket make the transition so much easier.