Flashbang
DuckDuckGo bangs resolved locally with a Service Worker
Details
- External ID
- 48911854
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Flashbang
- Website domain
- pages.dev
- Launched
- July 14, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 19
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7037037037037037
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I like to use DuckDuckGo-style bangs and snaps, they are fast and efficient shortcuts.However, neither Kagi nor DuckDuckGo resolves them as quickly as I would like and subjectively Google has better search results than DuckDuckGo.After trying a few local alternatives eg. unduck, unduckified, I wasn't satisfied, the ones I tried briefly loaded a page before redirecting causing visible page flickering, still took time to resolve the actual redirect and lacked advanced features (address-bar autocomplete). Flashbang avoids that by handling the redirect in a Service Worker, before the browser renders anything. On my machine, the added ove rhead is around 0.14ms.It has 14,470 bangs, custom shortcuts, address-bar suggestions, and works offline once installed (except for suggestions). No runtime dependencies.Try it: https://flashbang-dyr.pages.dev Code: https://github.com/ph1losof/flashbang
Enrichment
- Theme
- DeepSeek model deployment and inference
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- local duckduckgo bangs resolver
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The project is a lightweight client-side Service Worker that intercepts queries and resolves prefix/suffix bangs locally using a bundled lookup table.
Discussion
8 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Tor browser, Safari with Lockdown, Zen browser, uBlock Origin
Concerns raised: Incompatible with Tor browser and Safari Lockdown mode, Service Worker storage impact on browser memory footprint, Wasteful redirects on mobile connections with high latency, Firefox latency significantly worse than Chromium
Feature requests: Official website support for bang lists for fast navigation, Browser-side shortcuts to deep links (e.g., !ghsettings for GitHub settings), Bangs as part of web spec with client-side support across all browsers, Dynamic bang lists decoupled from websites
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 7 launches clear the similarity bar.
Attention rank: #5 of 8 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 210 days after the earliest competitor.
- Ducktape · hn · 2025-12-16 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- boomrng — intentional browsing · ph · 2026-09-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Poodle Panic · ph · 2026-09-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no AI, & all DDG bangs · hn · 2025-12-29 · 199 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- Ping Warden · ph · 2026-09-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- DuckDB community extension for prefiltered HNSW using ACORN-1 · hn · 2026-03-25 · 90 upvotes · similarity 0.31
- DuckFightClub · ph · 2026-09-09 · 141 upvotes · similarity 0.31
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.