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Bong: DuckDuckGo bang alternative, open-source and self-hosted(bong.glendalab.com)

31 points by captain_bender 1 day ago | 17 comments

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 1 day 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 11 hours ago

Kagi maintains an updated set of open bangs at https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs

I made `!` easier to type on mobile via double-space (double-tap SPACE to insert `!` similar to how macOS/iOS adds a period with double-space): https://whiz.leftium.com

Still a work in progress; I need to make the UI more intuitive: https://github.com/Leftium/whiz/

[–] Leftium 11 hours 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 1 day ago

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

[–] raquuk 18 hours ago

For anyone looking for it: here is the documentation: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox#w_how...

[–] sylware 22 hours ago

Maybe to support noscript/basic HTML browsers?

[–] xtiansimon 21 hours ago

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

[–] VCFundedGenYer 19 hours 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?

[–] PhilippGille 18 hours ago

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

[–] Shank 1 day 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 1 day 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 23 hours ago

What about gimp? Would you use that?

[–] niam 17 hours ago

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

[–] conorcleary 21 hours ago

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

[–] conorcleary 21 hours ago

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

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

[–] DonHopkins 15 hours 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.