Apostrophes help you alot. I solved the following puzzle with no letters:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ' _
_ _ _ _
Category was "Thing".
(Err, formatting isn't helping. That's two words, with 9 spaces, an apostrophe and a 10th space in the first word, and four spaces in the second word).
Schindler's List 33
president's plan 32
Microsoft's Xbox 26
yesterday's post 17
boatswain's mate 16
highlight's from 16 <-- need to include only nouns
Elizabeth's time 16
Wednesday's show 13
Microsoft's IPTV 11
The answer didn't appear in the corpus, but there was 1 entry for
Pinocchio nose <-- no apostrophe and 's'
Looks like i need a bigger corpus and more data scrubbing, there must've been something else that tipped you off before or during the show...
Presumably you didn't write it by hand as you'd use duckgo.com then I suspect. So, why not provide the terminal page URL instead of this forwarding page?
I set it as my default search engine in Chrome, and it first I kept going to Google manually for specific searches where duckduckgo isn't good enough, yet. But after I learned that "!g <search>" would do that for me with less hassle, I grew much happier with duckduckgo.
I was aware of the bang syntax - just if you manually wrote out the URL I expected you to use "dukgo.com/?q=!wa ..-.." or whatever rather than a long handed version.
Personally I use "wa" as a search keyword and then enter "wa ..-.." into my address bar.
I find it interesting that most of the guesses to this puzzle here are perfectly valid solutions; they do fit the pattern, but they just aren't he solution that you have in mind. And there's no reliable way to take the puzzle as given and arrive at your solution; it would have to be a matter of guessing the one of the multiple possible solutions that happens to be correct.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ' _
_ _ _ _
Category was "Thing".
(Err, formatting isn't helping. That's two words, with 9 spaces, an apostrophe and a 10th space in the first word, and four spaces in the second word).