

DuckDuckHack: Help us make the web a better place - ForHackernews
http://duckduckhack.com/

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Animats
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.

~~~
simi_
This is how <1% of the search market looks like:
[https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html)

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prezjordan
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 :)

~~~
boyter
What!? I missed out apparently :(

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

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emergentcypher
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?

~~~
boyter
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.

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pbhjpbhj
> _was my number one referrer for a long time_ //

What happened then?

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boyter
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...

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Lerc
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.

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

[https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html](https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html)

~~~
Heliosmaster
also goodies, and whatnot.

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mp4box
Their old goodies page was better.now it's redirecting to
[https://duckduckgo.com/tour](https://duckduckgo.com/tour) which is not that
helpful.

Edit:

The correct short url is [http://ddg.gg](http://ddg.gg)

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

~~~
mp4box
Oh, you are right about the URL and thanks for the link.Glad to hear it's
coming back.

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squiguy7
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.

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

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squiguy7
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...](https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-
goodies/blob/master/lib/DDG/Goodie/Week.pm)

~~~
moollaza
Yup, that was me :)

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

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

~~~
boyter
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](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.

~~~
kunstmord
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.

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

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fluffheadsr
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.

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jfaucett
where's the fork me?

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amirite1
sorry duckduckgo, perl died

