OK, but tomorrow when I've forgotten that I've done this and I do a quick search, if the very first thing that comes up isn't what I want, I bet I switch right back.
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It's slightly different, but you can do almost the same thing with Keywords in the Firefox location bar, and they presumably could support the bang syntax (or whatever) as well.
By all means, try and replicate this complete list in your Chrome browser: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html. I'll wait...
What makes the DDG !bang system awesome is its enormity. You don't look up what !bang to use to search something. You assume it exists, do it, and 99% of the time, you're right. That's a game changer.
I don't write Perl, but I know !cpan exists. I don't even have to look. I don't even know exactly what site it's going to search. But I know if I !cpan twitter, I'm going to be looking at a list of Perl libraries for tweeting.
That's the DDG killer feature. You want to do some kind of site-specific search or lookup, you just type in the most logical sounding !bang and assume it will work. You're simply never going to replicate that inside your browser.
I've switched to duckduckgo about a month ago, and indeed I'm regularly making search on google because duckduckgo just can't provide the results I want as well (especially when it comes to non english search). But it's way less a pain that it seems : I just type "g<tab>", and I'm using google. And I still have the high privacy advantage of duckduckgo for most of my searches where the duck is enough.
The bonus of that is that I now frequently use "gi<tab>" to search on github or "y<tab>" to search on youtube.
I've had DDG as my default search engine. It's been a bit rocky. I've left it in place out of privacy preferences, and used it occasionally, but had actually started getting used to the google search method above.
I'm consciously reverting to using DDG more (it's getting better). Why? Because my privacy and rights do matter to me. I've still got Google literally a keystroke away (or !g from any DDG search, or !sp for StartPage's private proxied Google search).
And DDG's TTY mode is pretty awesome: https://duckduckgo.com/tty/
I'll switch between methods though.
> 3. Enormity has been in frequent and continuous use in the sense “immensity” since the 18th century: The enormity of the task was overwhelming. Some hold that enormousness is the correct word in that sense and that enormity can only mean “outrageousness” or “atrociousness”: The enormity of his offenses appalled the public.
I am a little confused by your comment - has the word "enormous" come to mean "evil"? If so, maybe this new came about from people referring to the "enormity of a crime". It seems to have followed a similar etymological evolution to the word "gross" as in "gross depravity". But both words just mean "big".
It's not a general synonym for "enormous" or "having vast size", except by confusion.
I filed a bug about poor integration of DDG with w3m (a console-mode browser) based on default placement of the search button in the tab order. I received a response within the day pointing me at the lite interface: https://duckduckgo.com/lite
... which works perfectly.
That said: these do tend to be somewhat hidden, and I didn't find them through the "Goodies" or "Settings" DDG pages just now. Hrm.
http://www.boomerangbooks.com.au/Enormous-Turnip/Katie-Dayne...
Obviously, the children's story uses "enormous" to imply that the turnip is very large, not very wicked. Somehow "the dastardly rutabaga" or "the heinous swede" makes a lot less sense in this context.
Edit: Admission - I used DDG (my default search engine), not google.
Making DDG my default search is the best thing I've done for improving my browser search capabilities. Coming from Opera, I'm already in the habit of using a great many custom search engines, which is nice if you're in Opera, but then Chrome feels very empty. Making DDG the default search gives me just about all of my custom search engines (and more), with pretty intuitive keywords, without having to configure and sync every browser on my system.
ever since ~2-3 years ago, Google is only very rarely my first stop in searching, I so much prefer to go directly where I want.
biggest part of the reason was their second-guessing my query and their results deviating more and more from a simple AND-query over my keywords. it felt like someone replaced my filet knife with a butter knife. (the other part was their instant search result updating and other "enhancements" were super distracting to me).
the only times when I go straight to Google (by which I mean prefix !g to my query), is for a few typical "local/Dutch" or "commercial/consumer" searches, you get a feel for what Google would answer better. Those types of queries are exactly what Google has been optimizing for the past few years, at the great cost of their general and precise web searching quality.
(PS, tip for the Dutch HNers: '!wnl' searches the Dutch Wikipedia. No you don't need it often but when you do, it's nice to have it quickly. I couldn't find it first because I always had it keyed to 'wn' myself, which sends DDG to a weather search site or something)
If it was just my desktop, and for some reason it only had one browser, okay. Customization is always cool. But I use too many different computers with too many different browsers in too many different locations that DDG's !bangs makes this really convenient and portable, getting the fast browsing workflow I'm used to in just a few clicks.