Google dorks have been around since a long time and of late lot of people have become comfortable in google hacking aka google dorking. If you do not know what it means and how it could benefit you, feel free to look up google dorks in your search engine of choice.

I am not here to rant about google dorking today, but expose you to something different on similar lines. I ran into this a day ago and immediately felt the need to share with the rest of the community. Believe me, its cool!

Bang, Really?

Duckduckgo has this cool feature called bang aka exclamation mark. "!". It could be used to search anything elsewhere without having to go out of duckduckgo.

I like referring to Duckduckgo as ducky. Therefore, going forward please read "ducky" as DuckDuckGo. Back to our topic, ducky is known for it's privacy and claims to maintain anonymity of users and their search activity. However, this should not be mistaken as a privacy feature. It's only meant to make your search easy and convenient. Stay with me I'll show you how.

Let's look at an example: I use twitter a lot for quick information gathering. To search for stuff there I'd have to open twitter and search for the string or the hash tag of interest. Wouldn't it be cool if you could do the same from ducky without having to change apps?

All you have to do is type the following in the search box. If you are looking for, let's say, btcusd trend; then type the below text.

!tw btcusd trend

Ducky will search for the string in twitter like you'd have done normally and present you with the matched tweets. Take a look at the gif below.

Let's look at another example. What if I could search for a product on Amazon from within ducky without having to go into amazon?

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume I am looking for pen drives. I could type the following in ducky's search bar and I'd be presented with the results right there.

!amin 32g pen drives

Take a look at the gif below.

You could argue, how on earth do you expect me to remember what shortcut to use? Valid point! Well, I wouldn't have written this post if I had to memorize the shortcuts. It's simple, all you have to do is type the exclamation mark (bang) and you'll be presented with the available list. Continue typing based on where you'd like to search and the options, if available, will start showing up. See below:

Fyi.. If DuckDuckGo is your browser’s default search engine, you could use bangs in your address bar as well. Ducky has about 13k bangs created to improve your search experience. To see the list of bangs take a peep here.

Time to say goodbye for now. If you like or didn't like what you read, let me know. I'd love to read your feedback. If you want to collaborate feel free to drop me a text here or twitter and we could either hunt security vulnerabilities together or build new stuff. If you are not one of those who wishes to do any of the above; do not hesitate to share.

Talk to you later, ciao!