
DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode - frabcus
https://duckduckhack.com/
======
Nib
As someone who has actively participated in DDH for a while now, here are my
views:

\- A non-trivial part of the current contributions included "cheat sheets"
which IMO, really required a lot of effort to ensure correctness/usability but
don't really provide much improvement to search results(I don't think I myself
used the feature in the past 1.5 years more than 3-4 times), so, this should
really free up time for DDG staff to focus on the more important instant
answers and features.

\- The community has been, for a while now, getting smaller and less
contributing in the recent past. Backed by data from official repos(the number
of commits over time, that is)[1]. After all, there are only a finite number
of instant answers before they just become redundant.

\- The current model for the triggers(when an instant answer gets displayed)
is quite restrictive. It's just regex-based. IMO, a lot more growth can be
achieved using ML models for triggering, A/B testing etc.

I'm still kind of disappointed with this. Perhaps unrelated, but does anyone
have any suggestions for people willing to work on similar open source
projects.

[1]: [https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-
spice/graphs/con...](https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-
spice/graphs/contributors?from=2011-07-03&to=2017-09-10&type=c) ,
[https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-
goodies/graphs/c...](https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-
goodies/graphs/contributors?from=2011-07-31&to=2017-09-10&type=a)

~~~
romo3
Kiwix - most people are too conditioned to think that search has to happen
online and don't even realize what is possible offline.

Entire web archives such as the entire dump of wikipedia and stackexchange
(including media and indexes for search) can be stored locally. The missing
piece is Google level search quality on the local machine. Given that brute
force substring search can process Gigabytes in seconds nowadays. If you have
enterprise grade server hardware things are reaching 1000GB/s. At this rate,
there is no reason to think in a couple years local search of all known human
knowledge can't happen on a local device at Google level result quality.

For anyone interested in the search space look into whats possible today in
local offline search.

~~~
amelius
You might be right, but human knowledge is also expanding, of course. The
question is: will it expand faster than hardware capabilities?

Anyway, I wish we'd see more search and NLP related posts here on HN. It
deserves far more attention than it gets.

~~~
romo3
For the average person this rate does not matter. They don't need access to
the cutting edge of quantum physics, astronomy, dance, art or javascript.

All you have to do is look at the speed at which new info is being added to
Wikipedia and Stackoverflow which is stabilizing, i.e. it is not growing as it
once was. Basic/foundational knowledge is more or less all covered.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%27s_growth)

And that sum total comes to 50-60 GB compressed. Think about that number. It's
not big.

~~~
weaksauce
The sum total of our collective intelligence is equal to an install of gtaV...
Crazy.

~~~
panglott
Wikipedia is not the sum of our collective knowledge. It's little more than
the preface.

------
rubenbe
The subtitle is "Past, Present, and Future", but I'm really missing what the
future will hold. All they mention is that "We’re not sure what the next
community initiative will look like"

------
l0b0
Only vaguely related: Is there any fully FOSS general purpose web search
engine which gets close to DDG? It seems by now it should be possible to run a
community supported completely transparent search engine with relatively
limited means ($X00k/year).

~~~
jacquesm
> It seems by now it should be possible to run a community supported
> completely transparent search engine with relatively limited means
> ($X00k/year).

I'd argue the opposite, the time when such a thing would have been possible is
long past. If you want to get anywhere near to the quality in results that the
big engines offer then you're going to be spending some pretty big cash.

~~~
fao_
In my experience, the bar for quality has been rapidly dropping as of late. At
this point, most of the things I type into google come back null or with
random results -- even with results that used to return data that was
relevant.

~~~
j_s
Can you please provide an example of this type of search?

~~~
godelski
I look for scientific papers a lot and have found that I'm getting a lot more
sites like IFLS or Ars that are reporting on said paper. Or I'll get related
studies, but not the one I'm looking for, when the related studies definitely
don't contain a word I'm using.

This is even expanding into my code search. Like I'll type "do something os
related python linux" and get commands for windows as the first few hits.
Clearly I don't want windows.

~~~
j_s
Like a link please, I want to see "null or with random results". Not sure how
customized results affect things though.

~~~
godelski
I can only account for my experiences. Only time I've ever had null results
was when looking for really obscure things. I'm not the person that you
originally replied to.

~~~
j_s
Thanks for taking the time to provide a specific example where the results
weren't up to your standards.

------
natch
Am I understanding correctly that the instant answers (actual content) is not
on GitHub, and is only available on a web page semi-locked down from scraping
attempts by JavaScript paging?

If this is not correct, anyone have a link to the exact repo I should be
looking at? The link in TFA only goes to the main account page, not any
specific repo, and the repo names are not clear enough to tell if they have
what I'm looking for.

~~~
tagawa
The Instant Answers are all on GitHub but in four separate repos which, I
agree, can be confusing.

* [https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies](https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies) \- "Goodies" which are generally static answers such as cheat sheets, colour picker or unit conversions.

* [https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice](https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice) \- "Spice" for using public APIs, e.g. weather, transport status or currency conversions.

* [https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead](https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead) and [https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-longtail](https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-longtail) \- "Fathead" and "Longtail" are less common and are for text lookups, e.g. of programming docs.

Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff

~~~
natch
Thanks for clarifying!

------
stephengillie
Does this mean the end for Instant Answers? I hope not - it's one of the
information sources my bot uses to research the world.

It's amazing to see so much human effort went into this project and the full
1200-word list. I thought I had read somewhere that this was automation backed
by Wikipedia, but apparently it was entirely manual?

~~~
AdamSC1
DDG staff here - Instant Answers aren't going anywhere :)

------
bitmapbrother
This is why I'll never use another service by DuckDuckGo ever again. First
they shut down DuckDuckReader and now this.

~~~
boyter
I thought I was familiar with most of DDG's operations. What was
DuckDuckReader? RSS reader or something?

~~~
stonewhite
That was a joke essentially ripping on people throwing fits about Google
shutting down products, most famously Google Reader.

------
roansh
[Unrelated]

I was not aware of this being open source.

A quick look-through led to this sample search -- "Movies with Keira
Knightley". However, "Keira Knightley movies" fails to give the same instant
answer. Any permutations of words "Keira", "Knightley" and "movies" on Google
seems to give the list of movies -- which is how the behaviour should be I
guess, will probably open an issue/PR :)

------
avg_dev
What was DuckDuckHack?

~~~
kuroguro
Seems to be an editing community for instant answers on duckduckgo search

------
marvy
I started making something with DuckDuckHack, soon realized I bit off more
than I can chew. I wanted to delete what I did so at least the name would be
available to someone who wants to do a good job, but have no idea how to
delete it.

------
rootlocus
> That's over 5,000 pull requests, 250,000 lines of code and hundreds of
> squashed bugs!

I was expecting "hundreds of new bugs".

------
denisehilton
How can one join the Duckduckhack community. And what's the selection
criteria?

~~~
r3bl
You pretty much submit an instant answer or two and they add you to the
duckduckhack-community group on GitHub.

------
rnhmjoj
It seems that discarding your community once you have made enough money is
trending.

~~~
matt4077
How does this sort of conspiracy theory make any sense in this context? Or
even in general?

If they are making so much money, why would they end the program?

~~~
carussell
To be fair, the comment from DuckDuckGo in the Reddit thread[1] says that they
will continue to put resources into it ("staff are still improving the Instant
Answers we have, and will create any new Instant Answers we see are needed").
Which means the only change really happening here is to shut off the
contributions that DDG receives from others for free, which doesn't really
make sense as a business decision, either.

On the other hand, if you view it as an announcement that they're going to be
taking Instant Answers closed source to keep future changes in-house, then it
makes sense.

1\.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/6ymjj8/duckduck...](https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/6ymjj8/duckduckhack_is_now_in_maintenance_mode/dmq6ilk/)

~~~
tagawa
Just to clarify, the Instant Answers will remain open source on GitHub and
maintained in public.

Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff

