zeroclickinfo-spice

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

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

Most people don't use that directly, though. Most contribute an instant answer to either the "spice" (external api, like recipes) or "goodies" (self-contained functions) repos, https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice and https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies. What motivates someone to contribute to DuckDuckGo? It's fun, useful, and your work can potentially be shown at the top of the search results page for millions of people. disclaimer: I work for DuckDuckGo.

https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies and https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice I agree that there should be a link on duckduckhack (or, if there is, it needs to be more prominent and I couldn't find it too).

Making the !bangs more explorable is definitely partner to making them generally more visible. Someone had suggested an instant answer that would actually fix this: https://duck.co/ideas/idea/832/where-goes-that-bang and someone started working on it recently: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice/pull/546 We plan to overhaul the !bangs page when we get a moment and something that's already in place is a categorization system: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html i.e. they're arranged by type! So someone could, for example, modifying the upcoming instant answer to show all the available !bangs and their associated domains by searching for "image !bangs" (which would show all the available !bangs under the "image" category) or !blogs, etc. Is that more of what you mean?

As long as it doesn't supposedly conflict with their core values[0]… because you know your search engine should censor such things that don't conform to your world view ;) [0]https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice/pull/100

Adding onto this (I don't work for DDG), seriously check out the zeroclickinfo project[0] if you're looking to do some open-source over the coming holidays. I wrote a SoundCloud instant answer[1] and it was my first contribution to open-source (a little less than a year ago). That one pull request led to many others that have opened a lot of doors for me. It's a super approachable codebase and I had a lot of fun with it. [0]: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Music/soundcloud_ray_bradbury

The plug part is http://duckduckhack.com/ -- that is, these are open source components that plug into the system via this glue. This one in particular is at https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice/blob/maste... and https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice/blob/maste... The in part is they get submitted and we try hard to make them all useful and thus "in" DDG by default. However, ultimately you could a) consume them in your own applications (off DDG); and b) choose to turn some off or on more of the time.

Please check github: - https://github.com/duckduckgo - https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead - https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice - https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies Some of these are listed on our Goodies page: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies/ New plugins are announced on http://twitter.com/duckduckhack Feedback welcome.