I just DDG and have found !bang shortcuts that are broken or 404 for weeks. I've tried reporting the problems on their feedback forms or Reddit, but never got any responses. If it was open source, I could have submitted a pull request to fix them. I'm surprised they don't have automatic heartbeat queries with expected results for every bang shortcut, at least.
Is there a way to go straight to the first result using Jive Search? With DuckDuckGo searching for "example !" does this. (This is the main reason I don't use Searx.)