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Comment by brentadamson | Hacker News Reader

I run https://jivesearch.com, so I might be biased. The single biggest thing they can do to improve their product is open source everything. They've instead decided to move away from that by freezing their instant answers with no explanation as to if/when they will re-open source them. Makes me question their commitment to privacy and transparency.

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Personally, I love that DuckDuckGo gives me a usable alternative to Google that is privacy focused. It might be better if they were open source, but I'll take what I can get from the industry regarding advertising practices at this point.

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.

I had the same issue with them back when I was a user. If you find any broken !bangs at Jive Search feel free to submit a pull request.

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.)

I've opened up an issue: https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/issues/83

I didn't see the "!" documented anywhere but it seems to work at DDG. (We'll also add "\example" to do the same). https://duck.co/help/results/syntax

Just got done adding it. Let me know if there are any issues.

Won't open sourcing the code make sites get to cheat their ranking by trying to make it rank logic friendly?

They could open source everything else. I'm pretty sure they don't do their own ranking anyway.

You can make the ranking configurable. Once we get our own index built we will go back to doing this. The way we used to do it was by having a PostgreSQL function that is customizable once you get everything set up...I'm sure there are other ways to do it as well.

No because DDG is a frontend to Bing results. The ads are different (DDG shows Yahoo ads, which also shows Bing ads) and Bing shows Bing ads only.

Source?

Easy way to verify this, right-click on the ads, paste link

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

They do not have their own search index.

Really... You read the last part of that paragraph, but no the first?

>In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes).

Kinda silly to have a crawler that doesn't index anything.

They have an index but just for their Instant Answers (for which they have 400 sources) and not the organic search results. The last paragraph is what's relevant to the actual search index.

Not available. DDG is closed source.

just open a guest window from chrome, and type the same search terms in the two different search engines, and you would see different results. it's not hard to verify.

What are you saying? That DDG is not getting their search results from Bing and Yandex?

From your source:

In fact, DuckDuck Go gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

We continue to partner with more and more sources to bring you the best Instant Answers from the best sources. Our focus is on synthesizing it all together into a superior search experience.

I suppose that's quite different than 'DDG is a frontend to Bing results'?

It depends. For me, a search engine is about the organic search results and they get all their organic search results from Bing, Oath and Yandex. The 400 sources they talk about are used for Instant Answers, boxes and stuff like that.

Essentially it's Bing for the web results. The other 399 sources seem to be for non web things.

No, they get their search results (and rankings) from Bing and Yandex so it wouldn't matter.

I agree.

There is also searx: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

It has a couple of instances, like: https://searx.me/

Hey there,

To clarify, we haven't closed anything that was previously open, and all open source Instant Answers will remain open.

For now, we've paused community contributions for new Instant Answers and non-essential changes, until we can find a better way to work with the community and their contributions.

A better way than open sourcing it?

They've got to protect their IP somehow.

Do they? Their selling point is trustworthiness and privacy, not the software.

As most business's their internal code is probably a giant ball of mud that runs on caffeine and poor amounts of sleep. It works, but it probably wouldn't be reasonably releasable without refactoring and reworking a lot of the source so that it's componetized in some way.

Personally I just want DDG to make a search API that is free and doesn't require API keys. That way I can setup search in mobile or desktop apps and have it automagically be searching through specific sites like Soundcloud and Youtube and such.

Like if they're reading this, DDG is very unique and if they were to focus upon reducing costs, making efficient software, and better algorithms, DDG could be the service we shove into apps.

That won't happen as every API call to DDG would result in an API call to Bing/Yandex/Yahoo which they have to pay for.

Their selling point is trustworthiness, privacy and usefulness. To be useful, they must have quality software/IP. And in their opinion, that should be protected.

I much rather trust a product that is open source, which makes me slightly uncomfortable and concerned about DDG.

So let's say they release their source code - how can they possibly prove that their servers are running that same code?

at least for some functionalities, you can run it on your computer and observe the same behavior

If the code was AGPL'd and included contributions for which DDG didn't own the copyright (so DDG would be using the code under the terms of the AGPL), they'd be breaking the licence terms if they failed to disclose any changes.

It wouldn't be proof, but it would be a fairly strong commitment.

Will they protect my IP somehow?

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