AstianGO introduces bang shortcuts just like Brave Search

If you’ve ever typed out a search, scanned a page of links, clicked through to a site, and then typed the exact same thing into that site’s own search box, you already know the problem AstianGO is trying to solve. Its search engine now supports bangs, the little shortcuts that fire your query straight at a specific website instead of making you take the long way around.

The idea is not new. DuckDuckGo has done this for years, and Brave just improved its implementation by building bangs into its auto-suggest menu. AstianGO is walking the same path. You start a command with an exclamation mark, add a short code for the site you want, then type what you’re looking for.

So, for example, ‎!w renewable energy drops you on Wikipedia’s results for renewable energy. ‎!yt private browsers sends you to YouTube. ‎!gh vue components takes you to GitHub. With this feature, you don’t stop on a search results page first; instead, you land where you actually wanted to be.

Like here, I used the !yt bang and added PiunikaWeb.

It took me straight to YouTube search results for PiunikaWeb.

In the announcement post, Astian wrote: “One shortcut, one search, and you’ll be exactly where you want to be.” And that pretty much sums it up.

What I like here, much like with Brave Search’s recent update, is that the appeal is obvious to anyone, not just power users. You don’t have to memorize a giant list. Astian’s own advice is to start with two or three sites you visit constantly, maybe one for reference, one for videos, one for code or products, and pick up more from the bangs directory when you need them.

There is one thing worth keeping in mind. Once a bang sends you to another site, you’re playing by that site’s rules. As Astian puts it, “the third party’s privacy policy, terms, cookies, and data practices may apply.” Bangs make things faster, but they don’t wrap the destination in AstianGO’s own privacy protections, so that’s on you to remember.

It’s a small feature in the grand scheme of things, and it won’t change how you browse overnight. But for the kind of searches you repeat every day, it genuinely cuts out a step or two, and that adds up.

Astian has been busy lately. The same team recently pushed out a big 11.9 update to the Midori Browser with new themes and faster performance, so bangs land as one more piece of a steady run of updates.

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