DuckDuckGo has an annoying issue that when using almost any bang, you aren't redirected to the actual URL, but instead to a DuckDuckGo search for the letter L. Try it: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cat+!w
However, the actual URL is still encoded in the path - they probably accidentally broke it. This allows me to create an extension that fixes this, though!
This is not in any web stores. You will have to clone the repository and enable the extension in whatever way your browser does this. I have not tested this in anything but Edge, but it should work in any Chromium-based browser (Firefox doesn't have a good way to run extensions like this).