flashbang

14,000+ instant search shortcuts from your address bar

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Hey Product Hunt 👋 Search GitHub, YouTube, images, Wikipedia, and more than 14,000 other destinations directly from your browser’s address bar. Type !gh react and go straight to GitHub’s React repository results. Type !yt ambient music to search YouTube without opening it first. That’s flashbang: DuckDuckGo-style search shortcuts that work across Chrome and Firefox, resolve locally in under 1 ms, and avoid intermediate redirect pages. I’m Dmytro, the maker of flashbang. DuckDuckGo popularized bangs, and I love the workflow. I don’t use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, though, and wanted the same behavior to work independently of whichever browser and search engine I choose. There are already other bang implementations, but each makes different tradeoffs. Depending on the tool, commands may pass through a remote redirect service, briefly render an intermediate page, require an extension, create hidden analytics or offer a smaller and less customizable catalog. The biggest thing I wanted was speed. A shortcut shouldn’t need to load another service before opening its destination. flashbang’s Service Worker recognizes the command locally, constructs the destination URL, and resolves it in under 1 ms. Once installed, there’s no flashbang page load or server round trip in the core redirect path. Your browser goes directly to the website you requested. Setup requires no extension: If flashbang already appears in your browser’s search-engine list, make it your default. Otherwise, add it as a custom search engine using: https://flashbang.tech?q=%s For optional address-bar suggestions, use: https://flashbang.tech/suggest?q=%s That’s it - flashbang is ready on your next search. A few examples: - !gh react searches GitHub repositories - !w quantum searches Wikipedia - !yt ambient music searches YouTube - @gh api searches the web with results restricted to GitHub - @gh,so,mdn service workers searches several trusted sites at once What makes flashbang different: - More than 14,000 bangs, updated daily - Local shortcut resolution benchmarked under 1 ms - No intermediate redirect page or visible flash - Bang-aware address-bar autocomplete - Custom bangs and configurable syntax - Local frecency that prioritizes shortcuts you use most - No accounts, analytics, or tracking - Free, open source, and fully self-hostable The destination website still receives your search. flashbang doesn’t: once installed, core redirects resolve on your device. Suggestions are optional and separate from the core redirect path. You can run benchmarks yourself here: https://flashbang.tech/bench The feedback that would help me most today: did you encounter any edge case that isn’t already covered in the documented browser quirks? https://github.com/ph1losof/flas... If so, please include your browser, version, the command you entered, and what happened. I’ll investigate everything reported during the launch. You can also comment with a website you use every day, and I’ll reply with the shortest bang I can find for it. Thanks for trying flashbang. I’ll be here throughout the launch answering questions and fixing anything you uncover ⚡