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.

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...

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

Maybe to support noscript/basic HTML browsers?

It's a play on bang, not bing. DuckDuckGo popularized searches with a bang ("!"), so that from the DDG page you could do a search on Wikipedia for example, without navigating to Wikipedia first and searching there. Other search engines use it too, like Kagi for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Bangs

https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html

What about gimp? Would you use that?

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).

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

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

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.