Bong: DuckDuckGo bang alternative, open-source and self-hosted(bong.glendalab.com)
23 pointsby captain_bender6 hours ago4 comments
  • xtiansimon13 minutes ago
    What is this? The link is to a demo with just a text search field?
  • damiante4 hours ago
    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?
    • npmania3 hours 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.
    • sylwarean hour ago
      Maybe to support noscript/basic HTML browsers?
    • ginko4 hours ago
      Browsers already support programmable search keywords. (Firefox does at least) I‘m using those quite a bit.
  • omegaSigma955 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • Shank5 hours 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.

    • Roark664 hours 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).

    • polyamid233 hours ago
      What about gimp? Would you use that?
    • conorcleary22 minutes ago
      I'll learn it in your stead, and figure out why along the way.
      • conorcleary21 minutes ago
        (just out of spite and DDG is stepping up like MapQuest)

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