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Comment by _zekiel | Hacker News Reader

This is why we need help! :) Really, though, even if we had 100,000 employees, having a great Instant Answer for hyper-niche searches requires esoteric knowledge and expertise that can best be achieved from a community.

Not to mention, it can happen faster. Bitcoin conversions were possible on DuckDuckGo before Google bc our community rallied behind it. The people most passionate about a topic are most likely to create a great answer for it.

I can't imagine what my version of a color-code IA would look like.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cmyk%280.12%2C+0%2C+0%2C+0%29&ia=a...

Finally, thanks for the feedback (and for going into specific detail) and for the kind words. It's great to hear that you're seeing noticeable improvement.

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I realize I sound extremelh harsh in my reply, but honestly, "where's the patch" is not good enough an answer for a for-profit business. Search is an incredibly competitive market, and you need to figure out a vertical to get complete momentum in and expand from there. Programmers are an incredibly easy audience to target because "we" understand each other, but asking people to contribute to developing your core product is not a sustainable way to survive in a market like this.

If, however, you do have another realistic plan for world domination, and this is just an easy way to respond to the developer community, I completely understand. :)

> asking people to contribute to developing your core product is not a sustainable way to survive in a market like this.

Prove it. Seriously.

Sure, give me the funding.

Well, as another datum, my search for an awk solution gave me exactly what I needed with your new feature (TFA). I did that before I saw this thread or had heard anything about the feature.

Thanks! As the community grows, I run into more and more IAs that I didn't know were live. This one really felt supernatural when I was searching for a genuine answer in a moment of confusion: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=12pm+noon+or+midnight%3F&ia=answer

Just a quick suggestion: since Pantone colors are more "mainstream" outside of programming circles, do you think you can integrate that with the color-code IA? (Example usage case: Hey programmer Jim, can you make this part of the interface more like a pantone 537 U? kthx)

That's a good idea. I've filed it as a feature request: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/issues/2... Thanks

What kind of help do you accept? Genuinely interested.

The project and community are "large" relative to most open source projects but "most" open source projects have fewer than 10 contributors. To get to the scale of, say, Mozilla or FreeBSD, it will require community governance, so any help with driving the technologies and/or people/processes forward. If you're an interested contributor, then you are a potential owner in the project. The community is at the wheel here -- we're just paying for gas.

Does DDG allow building things on top of it? Like API access to search queries, for example. I'm very much into building things for fun and DDG is my choice engine (on mobile and desktop).

Yes, there's an API available for many of the instant answers: https://duckduckgo.com/api Not all though, because of syndication restrictions from the original data providers.

Cool, thanks! I'm going to play with it if ya'll dont mind. :)

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