Using bangs defeats the purpose of using DDG in the first place.

And DDG tracks your clicks just like Google does.

Absolutely not at all. It's the reason number one why I use it because very often I know on which page I want to search for a query. And having DDG as the default search engine in the browser gives me the ability to use the URL bar to directly query Youtube with !yt or Wikipedia with !w and a lot more.

>use the URL bar to directly query Youtube with !yt or Wikipedia with !w and a lot more.

My understanding is both Chrome and Firefox can do this natively, ie without DDG

Yes you can add these, in Firefox it's called Search Shortcuts and a few are there by default. But there are a few reason why I prefer DDG:

1. I don't have to add those things in my Browser

2. When I searched DDG for something don't find good stuff I can just go to the search bar on the DDG page and add any !bang to query a search engine I like (!y for Yahoo, !g for Google, …)

3. No matter which Browser I use on which device, the only thing I have to change is the default Search engine and it's set up for anything I want to search. This is especially nice for me since I use Firefox on my Mac, Brave and Safari on my iPhone and Brave and Chromium on my Windows device

Yeah, me too. Love the bang system. Don't forget to put the exclamation point in front! "!g"

> Don't forget to put the exclamation point in front! "!g"

At least some of the bang keywords work with the "!" on either side. I tried "g!" and "w!" and they work OK.

For all the bangs I use it works either way but yes, the official way is with the exclamation in front