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.

> 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