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Comment by carussell | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Google and Wolfram Alpha for these things over the years, but it has always irked me that I'm sending this info to a third-party, to run through their services that I have no way to read or improve the code, and knowing that these things are only available to me if I'm online. I was really happy when I found out the DuckDuckGo Instant Answers modules' source code is open.

It's been on my list of things that I will almost definitely never take the time to actually work on, but I wished what I had was (A) a browser extension or GNOME extension that incorporates an offline version of all the DuckDuckHack modules, and (B) the same thing in an open source mobile app. (This kind of thing could just as easily live in a command line app, though, and I'd be super happy if a project maintainer incorporated them into something like GNU Units.) I looked into it, especially for (B), but I realized that the DuckDuckHack code depends on Perl.

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Well, about offline availability, a large number of instant answers(spices and fatheads that are) use external APIs or indexed databases from websites, so they can't work offline.

DDG does have official(and unofficial) browser extensions and apps for iOS/Android.

> Well, about offline availability, a large number of instant answers [...] can't work offline

Sure, but there are a large number of instant answers that can and do work offline because they're simple, static tables, or are self-contained—existing only to apply transformations on the input (e.g., cheatsheets, natural language unit conversions, and calculations).

> DDG does have official(and unofficial) browser extensions and apps for iOS/Android

A browser extension that just sends the query the same as it would if you hit their homepage is in the "what's the point?" category, just like mobile sites that nag you to install their app when all it does is show you the same content that is (or could be) on the mobile site itself. The "is a browser extension" is not the interesting part. "Doesn't send data to a third party" and "can operate without being connected to the network" are.

Why can't we have an intermediary search service that grabs search results from Google and posts them on a search website anonymously?

Startpage [1] is what you're looking for.

[1] https://startpage.com

Right. StartPage.com delivers Google search results in privacy. Plus, it offers a free proxy with every search result so you can visit websites through StartPage anonymously, too.

Start page does just that. Ddg something and use !sp to search there.

Let me save you a lot of time for the future:

!s is enough to redirect to Startpage. :-)

In DuckDuckGo, !g more or less does this, in that it disables search bubbling, but I think google can see your client IP when the results are served to your browser.

Banging into Google using !G is like searching Google directly. Banging from DDG doesn't confer any privacy protections. A lot of people don't know this.

searx proxies user requests to different search engines.

https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

there are different instances : https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances

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