Core redirects
bangs.to is not meant to sit in the middle of every search. The normal path is: your browser loads the local redirect logic, the service worker resolves the bang on your device, then your browser goes straight to the final destination. That means bangs.to is not reading your search terms on a remote redirect server for the core feature.
That does not mean a search disappears into the void. The destination you choose, such as DuckDuckGo, Google, GitHub, YouTube, or Wikipedia, still receives the final query because that is where you asked the browser to go.
Suggestions and address-bar helpers
Search suggestions are a separate feature from redirects. If you use browser suggestion support or OpenSearch suggestion requests, the browser loads suggestions from DuckDuckGo.
That means suggestion traffic may touch the hosted site. This is optional behavior tied to suggestions, not the core !bang redirect itself. You can disable suggestions in settings or by editing out the DuckDuckGo suggest endpoint.
Cookies and local storage
bangs.to uses a small amount of browser storage so the tool can remember how you want it to behave.
Local browser storage
Settings, custom bangs, and local stats are stored in your browser on this device. Stats can include bang counts, recency-weighted scores, time-of-week usage buckets, and a few recent local query samples per bang so similarity ranking can work.
Same-site cookies
When suggestions are enabled, a same-site cookie can store your suggestion provider, custom bang triggers, and a compact frecency summary for suggestion ranking. That summary contains bang triggers and scores, not full query history.
What bangs.to does not do
There are no user accounts, no social graph, and no first-party analytics pipeline that profiles your searches. The product does not sell ads against your query stream or build a remote activity dashboard for you.
The hosted site does run on Cloudflare. Like most hosting platforms, that infrastructure can expose coarse aggregate request metrics at the platform level. That is operational hosting metadata, not a product analytics feature built into the search experience.
Practical boundaries
Privacy here is specific: bangs.to tries to avoid being the extra party in the middle of a bang redirect. It does not make the destination search engine private, it does not hide your IP from the site you open, and it does not replace the privacy choices of your browser, DNS, VPN, or network.
If you want the strongest boundary possible, self-host it, keep suggestions off, and review the source. If you just want a faster hosted bang tool with clearer privacy defaults, the public site is designed for that.