DuckDuckGo's bangs (extremely useful) let you search a specific website. For example, on Wiktionary, searching !wt hello will return the Wiktionary entry for 'hello' (or, if the entry for 'hello' didn't exist, a list of search results).

However, this 1) takes longer as it has to go through DuckDuckGo, 2) could even take you to a separate container depending on how you have that set up, and 3) is inherently less private because it's being sent through a middleman.

It's super easy to make your own custom keyword in Firefox at Settings > Search > Search Shortcuts. Using Wiktionary as an example again, I made the keyword !wt, mirroring the DDG bang. From there, I just searched some random bullshit string that didn't exist, found the URL https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=parametershere, stripped it to https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search, and appended %s at the end as a specifier character that gets replaced with whatever the search terms are.

Thus, now !wt hello takes me straight to https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=hello, which in turn goes right to the entry, instead of DDG –> Wiktionary search –> Wiktionary entry.

Why YSK: This is extremely obvious in hindsight, but even though I use bangs all the time, I never connected that I could just replace Firefox's keywords with the exact bangs I was already using for an objectively better experience. Bangs already make things way more convenient, and this is a more perfect form of that for commonly used websites.

Edit: I forgot to mention that, in the 'Advanced' options for a search shortcut, you can add search suggestions. So Wikipedia, for example, has the OpenAPI where you can get suggestions while you type (if that's your thing): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search= and append %s.

Somebody at my last job showed me how to do this to speed up searching within internal tools at work. It's only saving a few seconds and a few clicks, but it blows people away every time.

I've got a ton of them now.

Those seconds add up! And the ergonomics are worth it even if the time savings are marginal.

Theo wrote something to do this I recall

I've been using bangs for a while, and I never thought of this myself! I'll definitely start doing this.

Do you know of a good way to sync/export&import these keywords that does not involve the Firefox account thing?

If I'm trying to juggle several pieces of information and/or tasks in my mind at once, those saved seconds are worth waaaay more than the sum of the time they add up to.

One of the reasons I was able to switch to Duck Duck Go as my primary search was because I could just type "g (subject)" to search Google instead. Firefox keywords are great.

Great info/ideas! 👍

I use an add-on that has similar functionality (kinda). It's called Search from Popup or ContextMenu:

• Firefox Add-ons
• GitHub

Ooh! That sounds like an interesting usecase. I might try that at work as well

Savings add up and automation keybinders are an investment.

I once calculated that a full-time spreadsheet and word processing user can save more than a half a day per year just memorizing cut copy paste shortcuts. Let's not get into the tab key combos, or undo or print or escape, too hard to count, but a lot.

Wow that's a good one, I had seen it before but now that you said I realized I can use it even for other things.

I just set up Kagi Translate so I can translate things to my language.

I add: "https://translate.kagi.com/?from=en_us&to=pt_br&text=%25s" with keyword "@trans-en".
(it's showing %25s idk why, it should be %s)

Then I type "@trans-en [word in english]" and it redirects me to Kagi, translating it.