21 comments

  • damiante a day ago ago

    Do you really need a server implementation for this? Surely you could achieve this with a browser extension that grabs queries which begin with "!" and then has a mapping table of postfixes to query formats?

    • npmania a day ago ago

      I'm the author of this project, and I've actually been using it myself since I started it in 2022. The main reason was that DDG wasn't managing their list at all at the time, and another need was mobile web browsers, where extensions are not really as approachable as on PC. Also, the default "." is way easier to locate than "!" on mobile keyboards, and the prefix is configurable.

    • Leftium 12 hours ago ago

      You can actually do better than a browser extension via service workers: after the first download, it runs from the server.

      You can even configure this as your default search engine so searches from the omnibar work: https://whiz.leftium.com/go

      Source code: https://github.com/Leftium/whiz/blob/main/src/service-worker...

    • ginko a day ago ago

      Browsers already support programmable search keywords. (Firefox does at least) I‘m using those quite a bit.

    • sylware a day ago ago

      Maybe to support noscript/basic HTML browsers?

  • xtiansimon a day ago ago

    What is this? The link is to a demo with just a text search field?

  • VCFundedGenYer 20 hours ago ago

    This is confusing.

    the website is just a search engine. Doesn't explain what it does differently.

    The name is "Bong" which I assume is a play on an unrelated search engine Bing. What does DDG have to do with this other than some shared search engine results?

  • omegaSigma95 a day ago ago

    [flagged]

  • azaidrahman 21 hours ago ago

    [dead]

  • Shank a day ago ago

    Well, I just probably am not going to use a software product named “bong” but I suppose that’s just me.

    I think the issue with running something like this or SearXNG is that the good indexes will fight your efforts to use them unless you pay up and use the API. This product also suggests the google smart suggest API in the default config, which isn’t very much of a Google decoupling.

    • Roark66 a day ago ago

      I run SearXNG (and Crawl4AI) for my self hosted librechat (self hosted chatgpt equivalent that can search, use Internet etc).

      Duckduckgo.com and bing tend to respond well as well as Staan after an account is created with them.

      But what we need is competition between few large search providers, because prices now are bonkers. The only large-ish search provider that doesn't just repackaged Google or Bing is Brave, but they charge $5 for 1k requests. That is just silly. 1k will not last more than two dozen uses (each chat fires off 10-20 searches).

    • polyamid23 a day ago ago

      What about gimp? Would you use that?

      • 16 hours ago ago
        [deleted]
    • niam 18 hours ago ago

      On that basis I also avoid touch, finger, fsck, git, GIMP, lame, and coq.

    • conorcleary a day ago ago

      I'll learn it in your stead, and figure out why along the way.

      • conorcleary a day ago ago

        (just out of spite and DDG is stepping up like MapQuest)

        We should open-source-crowdfund DDG.com to freedirect to them.

    • DonHopkins 16 hours ago ago

      Do you apply the same standards to windows systems and social networks spelled the same as a popular slang term for ecstasy? It's the abysimal architecture and Nazis the repell me, not the spelling.