DuckDuckHack: Help us make the web a better place | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckHack: Help us make the web a better place

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DuckDuckGo wants you to write their vertical search engines. Those are the things that provide weather, traffic, stock quotes, sports scores, and similar data as specialized search results. Yahoo Search originated that concept, and now all search engines have to have it.

The vertical search engines you write go on Github, so someone could take all their verticals and put them into another search engine. It's not "send us the code and then we own it". Might be worth it writing one if you need the exposure as a programmer.

DuckDuckGo is still under 1% search market share, though.

This is how <1% of the search market looks like: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

I made a SoundCloud plugin for you folks a few years back. In return you sent me a t-shirt and a ton of stickers.

It was my first time contributing to an open source project and I haven't been able to stop since. Keep being awesome, and thanks for inspiring me :)

What!? I missed out apparently :(

Shoot us an email: open@duckduckgo.com and we'll take care of that.

I'm not sure I really understand what this is about. What exactly does DuckDuckGo want me to hack? Are people writing plugins to improve the search results of a for-profit company's proprietary search engine?

The main part that is open source is this:

https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo

"This repository contains the core code responsible for triggering and handling the DuckDuckHack instant answers. It is the base of the DuckDuckHack Instant Answer infrastructure."

I bet some people will critique the extent to which this is open source. Still, I it is a very cool platform, and I think it will only help to democratize access to different websites and sources of data.

Some people will probably not want to work on this for free (for a for-profit company), but I'm sure some people will do it purely from the desire to improve their search results.

Most people don't use that directly, though. Most contribute an instant answer to either the "spice" (external api, like recipes) or "goodies" (self-contained functions) repos, https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice and https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies.

What motivates someone to contribute to DuckDuckGo? It's fun, useful, and your work can potentially be shown at the top of the search results page for millions of people.

disclaimer: I work for DuckDuckGo.

You could probably find a better way of communicating the location of these repos. A while back I was looking to contribute but my efforts to even find an entry-point were in vain. This wasn't at all aided by the newfangled new-user-introduction page you made a while back (which is great, don't get me wrong) that seems to have hi-jacked the previous URI holding information aimed at people in my position.

A lot of people do it for selfish reasons (in a good way).

For example, say you have a website which surfaces information about specific CPU instructions. If you provide an API hook into this information you can expose it to potentially thousands (millions?) of people searching for it on DDG. You then provide a link back to your site below the information.

This is an excellent way to get traction early on. I did so with searchcode.com and DDG was my number one referrer for a long time, providing me with a steady stream of traffic which helped it get noticed.

>was my number one referrer for a long time //

What happened then?

I'm guessing it got noticed and google took over the number one spot.

Sorry about the late reply.

As someone mentioned Google took over, however that is for organic search traffic. DDG is still one of the highest referring domains, however it has been overtaken by slashdot, cnet, lifehacker etc...

Are people writing plugins to improve the search results of a for-profit company's proprietary search engine?

Yes, just like people write free software for Windows. Why is it surprising? Sure, you're benefiting the company, but you're also benefiting yourself and other users.

Is there a say to search DuckDuckGo for things that DuckDuckGo supports?

I'd like a way to specify a language, sdk and an identifier and get a function/class/other reference. Is that something DDG does? It it something it could or should?

My ideal magic app would do this automatically on a keypress in an IDE and put the result on my tablet.

Are the bang commands the kind of thing you are looking for?

https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

also goodies, and whatnot.

Their old goodies page was better.now it's redirecting to https://duckduckgo.com/tour which is not that helpful.

Edit:

The correct short url is http://ddg.gg

I belive it was ddg.gg which appears to still work.

Yes, thanks for the reply.I'm an idiot.

The url is http://ddg.gg. As for the goodies page, it's undergoing work right now. See https://duck.co/blog/goodies-page-replacement

Oh, you are right about the URL and thanks for the link.Glad to hear it's coming back.

I submitted a Goodie about a year ago and had it pulled into their repository on Github and am yet to have it appear in a search that should trigger it. It's a cool opportunity but I don't get how the instant answer plugins will make it in.

Which Goodie is it? I'd be happy to see why it's not triggering.

I actually emailed open@duckduckgo.com and got a real quick response. There is an issue open on Github now that I am following through with. Thanks for checking. If you're interested the Goodie is this one:

https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/mas...

Yup, that was me :)

Thanks again for notifying us, I'll be checking if any other Goodies may have fallen through the cracks.

Sorry for my ignorance, but as a user: why would I use DDG over Google?

This is something I posted in a Quora question and should hopefully answer it for you.

1. Privacy enabled by default. This certainly helped get traction when the NSA security revelations came around. DDG is not the only privacy conscious search engine but certainly one that pushes it as a feature more then others. See https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

2. !bang syntax. Remember back in the early days of Google they had a “Try this search on” and a list of search engines? !bang is that idea on steroids. This makes the cost of switching to DDG much lower then any other search engine because you are not locked in when its results are lacking.

3. Gabriel Weinberg (Creator) came up with a way to index the web for a fraction the cost of anyone else. I.E. use someone else’s index through web API’s such as Bing/Yahoo Boss. This means DDG can have an index in billions of pages without buying hundreds of machines and then crawling and indexing. Consider Cuil as an example. This isn't a reason to use it so much as explain why its a viable thing to use.

4. Persistence. Quite a few search engines based on Yahoo Boss and other API’s have come and gone, however DDG continues to be worked on. Just being around for 4 years gives it credibility.

5. DuckDuckHack. If you are a developer you can go to DuckDuckHack and add functionality you want. This may not sound that good, but because DDG already has traffic its a good incentive for start-ups and others to build on the DDG API to get some traction, which means they want to use DDG and promote it which fuels growth.

6. People. The people working on DDG are pretty awesome.

7. Uncluttered results. The results are pretty much just some links without too much fancy stuff going on.

Also the search results are never based on your previous search history - so no "search bubble" (I think it's called that). Everyone gets the same results.

Gabriel Weinberg (Creator) came up with a way to index the web for a fraction the cost of anyone else.

Not to be overly dismissive, but search engines using third-party indexes are nothing new; it's essentially the same concept behind metasearch engines like Metacrawler and HotBot.

To keep Google's monopoly in check. Google has exerted way more than its legal power to manually remove sites from its search results. Once removed, it means you don't exist. No entity should have that kind of power in denying people's freedom of speech. Manually action to remove sites is pure evil. With their world class engineers, scientists, billions of capital and years in the field, if they are not capable of algorithmically rank sites, then they have a problem.

The title "Open-source DuckDuckGo" is sadly very misleading, as only few selected parts are open source.

this is great! once i free up some coding time I'm going to leverage our apps API for our customers, so that their brand identity is the first thing that comes up on duckduckgo when someone searches for them.

where's the fork me?

sorry duckduckgo, perl died

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