DuckDuckGo has a neat feature wherein you can search for “cute cats !g”, and it will automatically redirect you to a Google search for cats. There are lots of bangs available, which makes it pretty useful when searching for things.
!bangs have some drawbacks over searching directly with the ultimate search provider though:
- The DuckDuckGo server can see the contents of search
- The search is slower since it needs to go through DuckDuckGo’s servers
Can we do better? Yes! The Service Worker API allows us to run a JS-based worker that essentially functions as a proxy between all pages that try to connect to the server. We can intercept requests locally and respond with a redirect before the request is sent to the server. DuckDuckGo could use a ServiceWorker to intercerpt searches with !bangs client-side, and redirect them directly to their ultimate location.
I wrote a demo of how such a system could be implemented.
Go try it out for instructions to try it out with your browser. It would be neat if DuckDuckGo used a Service Worker on their search endpoint to obviate the need for this though!
