
Introducing DuckDuckHack - bjplink
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/05/introducing-duckduckhack.html
======
reitzensteinm
This is absolutely fantastic.

I remember suggesting ages ago that Intel's ark.intel.com should be
integrated, so if you searched for Q6600 or 2600k or i7 980 it would show you
details of the processor.

I might have a shot at integrating that. Does anyone know about the legality
of doing so? I'm sure Intel wouldn't care, but showing the info in a zero
click box would seem to be different than merely scraping the pages in order
to return search results.

~~~
rabidsnail
Showing extracts in search results is widely considered to be fair use:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_v._Google>

~~~
joering2
perhaps bit OT, but read this
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_v._Google#Ruling>

(1) Operator did not directly infringe on author's copyrighted works;

(5) Search engine fell within protection of safe harbor provision of Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

wouldnt the same rules applies IF the government comes after The Pirate Bay?
Or even the guy who is now being extradited to US for his linking website?

~~~
chc
1\. The Pirate Bay's support of piracy is quite "volitional", to use the
ruling's terminology. The Pirate Bay goes to great lengths to maintain its
ability to enable piracy. Google will gladly exclude your entire site if you
ask them to.

2\. The purpose and character of Google's summaries and cached pages is quite
different from The Pirate Bay's links. (In particular, Google has no intention
of totally replacing the original site with an unauthorized copy, and its
content is not generally useful as such.)

3\. The Pirate Bay is not covered by the DMCA's safe harbor provisions (as,
again, it isn't open to the idea of taking down content at the request of
copyright holders).

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blairbits
This seems to me to be a great example of hour DDG can gain an edge on Google.
I don't think you'll ever see Google offering something like this; they're too
big. A smaller option like DDG has more room to grow, and can take advantage
of the crowd like this in ways that Google can't.

~~~
ImJasonH
Google offered something very similar to this a few years ago:
[http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-search-
add-o...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-search-add-ons.html)

Sadly it seems to no longer be supported.

~~~
eurleif
Your link also mentions that Google has a patent on this (patent no.
20070239716). Interesting.

~~~
frisco
(That's a publication number, not a patent number. Notice that it starts with
a year. Issued patent numbers are sequential.)

~~~
eurleif
Oops, you're right. The patent number is 7593939.

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cldwalker
For some context on how this has been tried before:

* <http://yubnub.org/> \- one of the first if not first to create a community around web commands. Primitive string substitution

* <http://queri.ac> (disclaimer: I maintained it for awhile) - a small community of web commands. Supported options, bookmarklets and more. Browser-independent.

* ubiquity, <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity>, - improved on web commands by having them written in javascript and had an awesome API for combining commands and rendering command output. However, it was firefox-specific.

The main innovation I see with duckduckhack is that they're using github to
foster contribution.

~~~
tripzilch
And that it directly adds to an already successful search engine.

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SeoxyS
This is begging to be renamed "HackHackGo." Has such a nice ring to it!

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Haha, you'll notice hackhackgo.com redirects to the same place :). We had a
large internal debate about the name and it came down to these two, with
hacksear.ch in third.

~~~
fraserharris
You compared this to Firefox Add-ons. Does that mean that these won't be
integrated into DDG natively? Will that only be at your discretion?

~~~
prakash
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3915588>

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driverdan
Here are a few ideas that would be cool.

# hackernews / hn

"hn _url_ " - See if a URL has been posted to HN. If so show the title and
link to post + comments

"hn _keywords_ " - Show HN search results with linked title and link to
comments

hn could be an alias to hackernews.

# reddit

Reddit's native search sucks in every way possible. Add a reddit keyword with
similar functionality.

~~~
prakash
Good ideas, we are collecting all of them here:
<http://ideas.duckduckhack.com/>

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Adaptive
This is like Google Labs turned inside out. Innovative stuff. I love it. More
power to DDG!

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chintan
Google had something like this back in 2007.

Matt Cutts: "An easy way to add new features to Google"
<http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/adding-new-features-to-google/>

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rabidsnail
Do you guys already support Mycroft plugins? Granted you can't use them to
play tetris in the results list, but they're easier to make (you only need to
know how to edit XML) and there are already thousands on
<http://mycroft.mozdev.org>. You just need to add some heuristics to scrape
the results out.

Actually, one could make a pretty good search engine that was just a frontend
for mycroft that was able to extract results and figure out which plugins to
use for which queries.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Not directly -- but will definately look into it.

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klapinat0r
Slightly off topic, but can anyone elaborate on the legal handling of
displaying the xkcd comics? As they are fetched directly from images.xkcd.com,
and do not contain a "discussion", would it still be considered Fair Use, or
have they made an agreement with Randall Munroe?

~~~
tantalor
Their usage is noncommercial (no fee) and links through, so it satisfies CC
BY-NC 2.5.

See <http://xkcd.com/license.html>

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cnbeuiwx
This is more about duckduckgo than duckduckhack, but Im starting to love this
search engine. Found out about the "s:d" command that sorts all the hits in
descending order.. combined with the arrow keys and the "h" key to get back to
the search box, you can search a multitude of search terms reaally fast and
efficiently.

And no spying on its users! Google, you can go f-ck yourself from now on.

I love this engine. Thanks so much for creating it!

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thanks -- for the record, s:d is an internal plugin that currently calls
Blekko.

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amitamb
VerticalSet is offering similar functionality. DuckDuckGo is starting to go in
the same direction.

<http://www.verticalset.com/>

Although aim is same to make search engine a platform, technologically it is
rather different. Would love to hear feedback on this.

~~~
boyter
I actually quite like VerticalSet as the display is very clean. The thing that
is most interesting about is is the installable extensions. Assuming its still
around in a few years like DDG it may be worth spending some time to create
some of them.

~~~
amitamb
Thanks for compliments, I don't see stopping development any time soon.

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matt2000
I couldn't figure it out from the docs, do the plugins get approved by
DuckDuckGo? Or does the user have to install them for their own account? I'm a
bit confused at how you would mediate between different plugins trying to
provide an answer for the same query, etc.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
The plugins get approved by DuckDuckGo, and generally we work with people to
make them good or round them out ourselves. In the future there may be a way
to install them in addition (for say, the ones we aren't using for the whole
site).

We have a bit of an answer for conflicts on this in the FAQ:
<http://duckduckhack.com/#faq>

"What if there are plugin conflicts? The ultimate arbiter is the user, and
that's the perspective we take, i.e. what is best for the user experience?
That said, often times it makes sense to combine ideas into one, better
plugin."

~~~
mburshteyn
It'd be great to let users download plugins. There might be small communities
that do regular searches where certain instant answer hacks might not make
sense to the vast majority of users.

~~~
crazedpsyc
You can download plugins from github, but note that they are under GPL as far
as I know. EDIT: Nope, perl5 license.

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sasha-dv
DDG is getting better all the time. These days, I use it almost exclusively. I
love the !bang syntax.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The !bang syntax is for pass-through search
(<http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html>). So, why even bother going to DDG and not
simply using address bar search shortcuts?

Why would I do 'ddg !g "my" "search" "terms"' as opposed to 'g "my" "search"
"terms"'??

Or is this using ddg as start page for your browser, or ...

Just curious.

~~~
samdk
For me, there are a couple of benefits of having the functionality built into
my search engine rather than my browser.

First, all I have to do is set up DDG as the default search engine in my
browser, and then I get tons of search shortcuts working without any more
effort on my part. I don't have to worry about syncing between different
computers, browsers (I use Chrome and Firefox at different times), and
operating systems.

Second, there are many more shortcuts than I'd ever think to maintain myself,
and somebody else has already put the work into defining them. I can do
!{relatively popular site} and even if I'm guessing, it almost always works.
(In fact, I can't remember the last time it didn't.)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
So, if there was an addon that bundled all these !bang pass throughs as search
keywords and worked cross browser would you still use ddg for this?

I'm going to guess "yes" but perhaps for others it would be no?

I'm not saying this just to be argumentative (honest!). Just that when I tried
DDG as my search provider before (which was a while back now) I found that
!bang looked like a great idea but just made searches slower for me. But then
I've got quite a few years of established search keywords.

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qeorge
Reminds me of Yahoo's Search Monkey (RIP). DDG seems like a much better home
for this (awesome) idea.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_SearchMonkey>

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16s
At least _someone_ is innovating in search.

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mkmcdonald
Nice idea.

I have but one problem, and it's with the site (DuckDuckHack) itself.

Could the author just make the tutorial section scrollable with the rest of
the page? The current functionality is quite awkward. It's also ignorant of
(most of) the keyboard (home, end, page up, page down, etc.), which is the
quickest way to traverse a page.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thanks -- the site looks for the scrollwheel and the down arrow, both of which
will open the tutorial after which page down et al. should work as expected.
Are you seeing different behavior or just wanted to hit page down initially?

~~~
mkmcdonald
I'm referring specifically to the state before the pane is activated. It feels
awkward to have so few options to activate it. The transition/animation also
toys a bit with scrolling up/down.

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evoxed
Switching my default search in 3..2..1..

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theon144
Yay! I wanted to contribute to duckduckgo a while ago, but found it quite
daunting, this is perfect!

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jjcm
Crowd sourcing better search results through content plugins. Genius - great
job ddg/h guys!

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charlieok
I have seen duckduckgo popping up in more places over the past few months. I
don't know much about them but they're obviously doing something right. This
just pushed me over the top in setting them as my default search engine.

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pirateking
I started using DuckDuckGo for its position on privacy, but that is just one
reason of many to use it now.

I have more than a few ideas for hacks, after reading the very nice tutorial.
Look forward to playing with it.

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ekanes
In 10 years, Google could be in serious trouble on the search front. Yes it
will take that long. Yes they could actually lose. Rock 'em Gabriel.

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Natsu
I saw this on GitHub a few days ago (there's, umm, not a lot else in the Perl
section) and have been thinking about things to add.

Looks good, guys!

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_ankit_
Can't wait to spend a weekend creating a plugin!

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whackberry
Awesome! Wish I could upvote this twice.

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kulkarnic
How does ranking between plugins work? Is the order arbitrated in advance?

~~~
perlgeek
Plugins should be narrow enough to only ever trigger one of them

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gcr
Nice! Will this be integrated with the zero-click info API at
<http://api.duckduckgo.com/> ?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
The goodies/fathead plugins should auto-flow through. Spice/longtail are a bit
more complicated but would love to get them in at some point.

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swah
OT: nice signin implementation there!

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asselinpaul
This is so cool...

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shellox
It's really cool that duckduckgo want to go this way. I think both, the
creator of ddg and the users will profit of the ideas, which will come up in
DuckDuckHack. The users know what they want, so it's the right choice to let
them be part of it ;)

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iamgopal
I wonder how google fights on every frontier, and apple being smart always
avoid fights.

