YSK: When DDG is your main browser search engine, using !bangs performs fast searches directly on supported sites. e.g: !$ search criteria, where $=w-wikipedia,yt-youtube,r-reddit,rsub-redditsubs,...

And !bang searches all the bangs.

You can also create your own search prefixes (keywords) in Firefox, which won't have the extra step of routing searches through DuckDuckGo.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox#w_how-to-use-keywords-with-bookmarks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaxpbnNgiFM

You can also use duckduckstart to use Startpage for normal requests but still be able to use bangs or SearXNG with a double !! for bangs

Yes. It does work.

In other news, yelling into the address bar only gets you to wikipedia with ramblings, given a bang of "!", it will default to Wikipedia with the prepended text as search criterium. So 'search criteria !bangs' also works. FYI