I often find myself guessing at some of the DDG goodies or !bang searches, and more often than not the thing I want already exists.
I wish the !bang searches in particular were more discoverable, though. Perhaps if you search for "foo site:bar", or "foo bar" where bar is a well-known site or service, DDG should suggest 'Try "foo !bar" or "!bar foo" to ...".
I too have had trouble finding where the bang codes are.
I think the easiest is this: Go to the ddg home page, click on the drop down to the right of the search field, and at the bottom of that is "By category (!bang)"
We plan to overhaul the !bangs page when we get a moment and something that's already in place is a categorization system: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html i.e. they're arranged by type! So someone could, for example, modifying the upcoming instant answer to show all the available !bangs and their associated domains by searching for "image !bangs" (which would show all the available !bangs under the "image" category) or !blogs, etc.
Is that more of what you mean?
It seems a little strange that typing in a search term, and then the interrobang, gives you a simple text autocomplete drop-down, without the very useful logos and search engine descriptions you get if you type the interrobang first, without the search term.
Would be nice if, as you say, you could type in, for instance, 'lung scaffold biomedical !', and have a drop-down bang search appear, populated with the relevant scientific search engines, and then also include graphical logos, and descriptions. It would make the !bang options much more discoverable.
--the !bangs are already categorized and it sounds like you're looking for a way to see which !bangs might apply to your search (for better results). ~explore mode. Would the suggestion of making them searchable by category be a good solution or something even different?
The categories are useful, but it would be great if you could work out a way of returning relevant search engines to a particular request, inline with that request. It just reduces friction.
> Would the suggestion of making them searchable by category be a good solution or something even different?
On the /bang.html page I think it would be good if you could search through the !bangs using a small text description, or a series of tags, because a single category doesn't really cover it. For instance, scirus or google scholar are science search engines, you can't just put them in the 'academic' or 'learning' section, and expect people to be able to find them, unless they already know the sites.
An interrobang is a combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark. You mean a bang, which is a shorthand for an exclamation mark. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang
I wish the !bang searches in particular were more discoverable, though. Perhaps if you search for "foo site:bar", or "foo bar" where bar is a well-known site or service, DDG should suggest 'Try "foo !bar" or "!bar foo" to ...".