

DuckDuckGo Plugin: Hacker News Search - sherjilozair
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hn+startup+ideas

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antidoh
Why is this called a plugin? As far as I can see it's just an additonal search
term (hn).

<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hn+startup+ideas>

Compare with DDG's existing bang code for HN: !hn + startup + ideas

That searches hnsearch.com directly, and gives good results on hnsearch for
the search terms.

The "plugin" search from the post has an hnsearch box at the top of DDG's
results page, but when you follow the hnsearch link, those results are not as
good as the !hn search (IMO).

The nice thing about the "plugin" search is that there are results from the
rest of the web. But that's normal.

Am I missing something?

~~~
sparkinson
Bang syntax (like !hn) will take to directly to the sites search. Try for
example "!g hacker news".

Plugins, or goodies I think ddg calls them keeps you within the site and
provides more info in that zero-click box.

~~~
antidoh
Understood, but I don't see the plug, or the in. They've just added "hn" as
another term in the search string. Did I lose or miss something?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
The plug part is <http://duckduckhack.com/> \-- that is, these are open source
components that plug into the system via this glue. This one in particular is
at [https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-
spice/blob/maste...](https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-
spice/blob/master/lib/DDG/Spice/HackerNews.pm) and
[https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-
spice/blob/maste...](https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-
spice/blob/master/share/spice/hacker_news/spice.js)

The in part is they get submitted and we try hard to make them all useful and
thus "in" DDG by default. However, ultimately you could a) consume them in
your own applications (off DDG); and b) choose to turn some off or on more of
the time.

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pav3l
Google is an excellent search engine. If you have privacy concerns, don't
store your personal information with Google. It's really that simple.
Switching to other search engines because of privacy concerns is just silly in
my opinion. I have those concerns as well, but instead of missing out on
Google search I choose to not use any of Google's other services (e.g. Gmail,
G+, etc.) that would store my personal information (and possibly tie it to my
searches). If you want to take advantage of webmaster tools, analystics, etc.
just create an account _just_ for that, and don't use it for actual
communication.

------
moystard
DDG gets confused when you use "hn github" and displays Github repositories
instead. I think the algorithm should be slightly tweaked so when several
keywords are present, the first one has priority over the second one.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thanks for the feedback -- we're discussing it right now :)

------
kang
How is this better than google? Even if you talk the "hacker way" the 'site:'
tag is exact and specific whereas this is not.

Upvotes simply show the anti-google (anti established) mindset that hn has.

~~~
sherjilozair
site: only returns with links that are in this subdomain. DDG searches all the
links that have been posted in HN. I think this is a big difference.

------
sherjilozair
I didn't mean to incite Google v/s DuckDuckGo war by posting this page. I once
had an idea of having a smart Hacker News search. The idea is that the full
web might have too much noise. Hacker News serves to be a collection of
webpages that are interesting to us, and are intelligent. Moreover, each of
them have a rating associated with them, and we don't need back-link analysis
to rank them.

If I search for startup ideas in Google(full web) or in Hacker News(the
interesting subset of the web), I would have a much better result in the
latter, that will ensure that only those articles come that have been
'approved' by the HN community, and not noise and fraud that Google might have
picked up.

Now, current hacker news searches like site:news.ycombinator.com or hnsearch
fail to do this. I'm not just interested in things with this domain name, or
doing exact string matches. I want to Search, and all the algorithms and
techniques that made a proper search engine like magic. What hnsearch is doing
is basically grep.

This DDG plugin is the closest approximation to my idea, but still not
perfect. Hopefully, some day I will find from my busy semester schedule and
make something awesome from this idea and show you guys. :)

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bruceboughton
In what way are these results different to if there was no HN customisation
and a user searched for "hn startup ideas"? I see there is Honduras news in
there with the plugin.

------
robotmay
Nice implementation. Much more useful than my phonetic plugin
(<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=phonetic+hacker+news>) at least :D

~~~
mapleoin
that's misleading. I was expecting to get hækə(ɹ) n(j)uːz

~~~
robotmay
True, but it makes ordering takeaway much easier.

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mikebracco
I have DuckDuckGoog as my search engine in Chrome -
<http://www.duckduckgoog.com>. If you add it as your search engine it routes
all queries using DuckDuckGo syntax to DuckDuckGo (like !bangs) and all others
through Google. Pretty useful.

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scrrr
This is useful. I am tired of typing site:news.ycombinator.com into Google.

~~~
ubojan
if you use Chrome, you can add new search engine (right click on address bar
-> Edit search engines, scroll down till end) and paste this into URL query
field:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site%3Anews.ycombinator.c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com),
and give it a short name, for example hn. Now you can search Hacker News by
typing: "hn search query" into address bar (without "").

~~~
patrickk
Great tip thanks!

Now if I type the letter "n", chrome picks up "news.ycombinator.com", if I
press tab second, it goes to search HN, and pressing return second goes to the
sites itself. Lovely time saver.

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bashzor
It's better than HNSearch? Why?

