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duckduckgo
zeroclickinfo-goodies
Perl2012–2022
duckduckgo / zeroclickinfo-goodies · Archived

zeroclickinfo-goodies

DuckDuckGo Instant Answers based on Perl & JavaScript

Web Development
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
16Distinct people
21Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
987GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

DuckDuckGo Instant Answers based on Perl & JavaScript

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year21 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-10-28 08:27:16 UTC to 2022-02-23 13:32:26 UTC.

02462012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
This repo is now archived DuckDuckHack went on maintenance mode in 2015 and we aren't in a position to continue it. This repo hasn't been maintained subsequently and so we are archiving it. Need to report a bug? If you find a bug or relevancy issue, the best way to report this is via the Feedback button on the DuckDuckGo.com search results page. These issues are compiled and reviewed daily. Have a suggestion or idea? The best way to report these is also via the Feedback button on the DuckDuckGo.com search results page. You can also share your thoughts with our community on Reddit.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

21 sources
danso·Feb 23, 2022
Non-paywall link to NYT story: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/technology/duckduckgo-con... 5+ years ago, back when [0] people noticed that Nazi sites were the top Google results for "did the holocaust happen" — presumably because of the way Google prioritized literal text match in titles/headlines for esoteric queries — DDG had been providing bespoke responses via DuckDuckHack, its crowdsourced instant answer program [1]. Back then, and today, if you query a variation of "did the holocaust happen", the top result, in big large text, is "Yes" DuckDuckHack was discontinued in 2017 because it didn't scale. The associated code repos are still available; for example, you can see how DDG's Instant Answer test suite specifically validated answers to questions about the Holocaust and the moon landing. [2] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/comme
Read the rest
ntisfree/2016/dec/11/google... [1] https://duckduckhack.com/ [2] https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/mas...
In Fed Up with Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo
danso·Mar 28, 2018
I thought it'd be worthwhile to see how DuckDuckGo handles things since it's ostensibly the search engine without personalization. And it has a different scope and expectations from Google. One thing that comes to mind is how it dealt with the "did the holocaust happen"-type problems by hard coding the instant answers [a], something which Google doesn't admit to doing outright, and wouldn't be scalable anyway. DDG's results for "black girls" is pretty different from Google present-day, though definitely a lot cleaner compared to what the author saw in 2009: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=black+girls&t=hb&ia=web (sidenote: it's not clear if the author disabled SafeSearch in her 2009 search or not. SafeSearch was definitely part of Google by then, and I can't imagine "sugaryblackpussy.com" getting past that filter. If you turn DDG's Safe Search
Read the rest
to "Moderate" -- "Off" returns the same results as "Strict" -- you will get a lot of very NSFW results. I guess this sidenote raises a new set of issues about the author's methodology but will ignore it for the sake of brevity here.) The first result is an article titled "Black Girls Only" in Ebony magazine [0]. Which isn't a bad article (or publication). Maybe people would object that the first result is actually about sexualizing black women (albeit positively). The 2nd result is a lot less promising: "Hot Black Girls (45 pics)" at acidcow.com, which has a higher Alexa ranking [1] than Ebony.com (22K vs 63K), but basically looks to be a clunky imageboard. blackgirlscode.com is #6, followed by blackgirlsrun.com (a running club). The rest of the top results are black girl image sites (photobucket, a Facebook group for Big Beautiful Black Girls). The most notable difference between DDG and Google Results, besides what's #1, is that Google results have a lot more news articles in which "black girls" are in the headline (via NPR, nytimes, and theroot). DDG is a lot more sporadic in comparison DDG for "white girls" is not terribly better in terms of being female-friendly: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=white+girls The first result is to the Amazon listing of a book titled "White Girls", by a well regarded New Yorker critic [2]. But the #2 result goes to urbandictionary.com, and #3 hilariously goes to the Wayans Brothers' classic, "White Chicks". There's a bunch of results relating to "White Girl", the mediocre 2016 film (Wikipedia, rogerebert.com, rottentomatoes.com, etc). And then a bunch of results about white females with men of other races. [a] https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/b7a... [0] http://www.ebony.com/news-views/black-girls-only-503 [1] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/acidcow.com [2] https://www.amazon.com/White-Girls-Hilton-Als/dp/194045025X
In Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
tagawa·Sep 11, 2017
The Instant Answers are all on GitHub but in four separate repos which, I agree, can be confusing. * 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 - "Spice" for using public APIs, e.g. weather, transport status or currency conversions. * https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead and 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
In DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode
Nib·Sep 10, 2017
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
Read the rest
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-goodies/graphs/c...
In DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode

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