I work with Gabe every day and I know how much he appreciates the continued support from the HN community. Generally, it sounds like he/we should post more :)
What content would you be most interested in following?
This is why we need help! :) Really, though, even if we had 100,000 employees, having a great Instant Answer for hyper-niche searches requires esoteric knowledge and expertise that can best be achieved from a community.
Not to mention, it can happen faster. Bitcoin conversions were possible on DuckDuckGo before Google bc our community rallied behind it. The people most passionate about a topic are most likely to create a great answer for it.
I can't imagine what my version of a color-code IA would look like.
Finally, thanks for the feedback (and for going into specific detail) and for the kind words. It's great to hear that you're seeing noticeable improvement.
I realize I sound extremelh harsh in my reply, but honestly, "where's the patch" is not good enough an answer for a for-profit business. Search is an incredibly competitive market, and you need to figure out a vertical to get complete momentum in and expand from there. Programmers are an incredibly easy audience to target because "we" understand each other, but asking people to contribute to developing your core product is not a sustainable way to survive in a market like this.
If, however, you do have another realistic plan for world domination, and this is just an easy way to respond to the developer community, I completely understand. :)
Well, as another datum, my search for an awk solution gave me exactly what I needed with your new feature (TFA). I did that before I saw this thread or had heard anything about the feature.
Thanks! As the community grows, I run into more and more IAs that I didn't know were live. This one really felt supernatural when I was searching for a genuine answer in a moment of confusion: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=12pm+noon+or+midnight%3F&ia=answer
Just a quick suggestion: since Pantone colors are more "mainstream" outside of programming circles, do you think you can integrate that with the color-code IA? (Example usage case: Hey programmer Jim, can you make this part of the interface more like a pantone 537 U? kthx)
The project and community are "large" relative to most open source projects but "most" open source projects have fewer than 10 contributors.
To get to the scale of, say, Mozilla or FreeBSD, it will require community governance, so any help with driving the technologies and/or people/processes forward.
If you're an interested contributor, then you are a potential owner in the project. The community is at the wheel here -- we're just paying for gas.
Does DDG allow building things on top of it? Like API access to search queries, for example. I'm very much into building things for fun and DDG is my choice engine (on mobile and desktop).
Yes, there's an API available for many of the instant answers: https://duckduckgo.com/api
Not all though, because of syndication restrictions from the original data providers.
Thanks for helping point this out! I lead community at DuckDuckGo and there are a lot more, "Instant Answers" that the world should know about. The community of open source devs really deserve a standing ovation for things like this (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=who%27s+in+space&ia=answer).
Check out the whole list of answers in development and live here: https://duck.co/ia
Most of what DDG is doing is great, and for a lot of things it's just as good as and often better than Google. It's really good to see how far you've come.
A few times I've found the instant answers are just plain wrong, and even though I've hit feedback they never got corrected. Hopefully you're trying to improve how you react to feedback? It's partly because you do so damn well on things like single link for a song lyric search, or just the answer snippet you need like an IP address, and highlight it better than Google that it becomes so noticeable when you do get something wrong.
I'd be hard pushed to remember a specific broken search to point you to as last time was around Christmas.
We're actively working towards improving feedback loops. But one of the best parts about our Instant Answers is they are open source. You, or others, can help submit new answers or correct them as part of our duckduckhack.com community. Some of our information comes from partner sites via an API and so if you find something wrong there it can take a bit longer to fix as we need to reach out to them and have it updated on their end.
As a team of 35 tackling a big problem like search we count on our community for help, but we do try and react to feedback as best we can.
If you ever seen anything grossly wrong, such as vandalized information or something malicious you can also report that to us more directly. Through our Instant Answer email at open@duckduckgo.com
Lastly, we really appreciate the feedback. Since we don't track users, we only get that type of feedback when you take the time to submit it or to post it here - so I want to let you know your voice is being heard and that we are indeed working through the feedback we get. Thanks for sharing it! :)
A month or two ago I asked for a fix to FX queries (in the wrong part of github - in fact I probably did everything wrong as I know nothing of github) - within the day someone had added the new syntax parse.
I work at DuckDuckGo. Our most popular open source project is DuckDuckHack: http://duckduckhack.com/ Developers leverage code, APIs, wikis, etc. to answer searches (across a broad range of topics) in few or zero clicks. What we call, "Instant Answers."
The nature of the project only works well with the involvement of non-developers in that the best Instant Answers are made by subject-matter experts across a variety of fields. Suggesting ideas, finding great sources, and the overall experience of the IA are all better if coming from someone who really wants to improve searches for that topic. https://duck.co/help/community/contributing
Let me know if you're interested in getting involved--any time :)
Both! We're really in need of some additional folks with commit bits, if you're interested in getting involved on the technical side.
This page will help you find the best place to start but please let me know if I can help: http://duckduckhack.com/
Thanks! We'd also encourage every developer to check out: http://duckduckhack.com/
The example reported doesn't seem to be an issue the organic links but if you find any at all, please let us know. Also, we're on the lookout for any instant answers that pop by default but are irrelevant for the query. If you see any, please let us know at https://duck.co/forum
How about you incorporate "flag as irrelevant" button next to each result? Or some way of users reporting back to you the order they would expect from your SE? I am not sure how you could combat misuse, but I'm sure there coule be some measures taken.
I'd like to see this as well. There used to be a single link for the results page to report bad results, though it didn't allow adding any details or flagging particular links. And even that seems to have disappeared.
We'll definitely think about how to improve this!
We added the Feedback button in the Menu options so that people used the Feedback page: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback
That way, the reports are really actionable (since it's broken out by type) and people don't spam the form :\
I saw that link, and the categorization seems fine, but following the feedback link doesn't automatically capture the search data. You need a link that automatically includes the search query, so that the user doesn't have to manually transcribe that data.
Ideally, you should do so via JavaScript inline on the search query page, to make it easy for the user to note the bad search results without switching back and forth between the results page and the feedback page.
Click feedback link, click category, identify relevant/irrelevant results, optionally type a sentence or two, submit. That flow needs some UX optimization.
To clarify, this is not a DuckDuckGo product and having your autosuggestions come from Google means passing your searches to them as well.
The next version of DuckDuckGo was released today: https://duckduckgo.com/
and includes our own autosuggest (with !bang autosuggest as well--just type !) . You can get autosuggest in your browser's address bar with some of our browser addons like the Firefox one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-fo...
Thanks for the heads up! We're going to update this page soon--IMDBAPI uses a variety of sources, one of them (iirc) is OMDBAPI.com and it looks like the error is stemming from there: http://www.omdbapi.com/?t=Shawshank%20Redemption
FYI the sidebar scrolling doesn't work (and general layout is a bit iffy) on Nexus 7 chrome. I wasn't going to say anything but if the audience is very general it might be worth fixing - the new ddg works awesomely other than that! :)
What content would you be most interested in following?
"paging epi0Bauqu!"