10 ms·

DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode

209 points by frabcus 9y ago

rubenbe 9y ago
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"
rnhmjoj 9y ago
It seems that discarding your community once you have made enough money is trending.
- matt4077 9y ago
  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?
  - rnhmjoj 9y ago
    I don't know, the whole post reads like a "So long, and thanks for all the fish" to me. They don't need a community anymore because they got bigger and at this point it's just easier to close it rather than having employees taking care of the user contributions. Reddit has just pulled the plug to all their open source repositories. This will make it harder to develop and keep third party clients updated, like the ones without ads for example.
  - carussell 9y ago
    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/duckduckhack_is_now_in_maintenance_mode/dmq6ilk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/6ymjj8/duckduck...
    - tagawa 9y ago
      Just to clarify, the Instant Answers will remain open source on GitHub and maintained in public. Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff
- kodfodrasz 9y ago
  I'm not sure how you reached this conclusion from this news, given some insider infos from other comments. Maybe you have a relevant story to tell about DDG?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Nib 9y ago
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/contributors?from=2011-07-03&to=2017-09-10&type=c https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice/graphs/con... , https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/graphs/contributors?from=2011-07-31&to=2017-09-10&type=a https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/graphs/c...
- carussell 9y ago
  I've been using Google and Wolfram Alpha for these things over the years, but it has always irked me that I'm sending this info to a third-party, to run through their services that I have no way to read or improve the code, and knowing that these things are only available to me if I'm online. I was really happy when I found out the DuckDuckGo Instant Answers modules' source code is open. It's been on my list of things that I will almost definitely never take the time to actually work on, but I wished what I had was (A) a browser extension or GNOME extension that incorporates an offline version of all the DuckDuckHack modules, and (B) the same thing in an open source mobile app. (This kind of thing could just as easily live in a command line app, though, and I'd be super happy if a project maintainer incorporated them into something like GNU Units.) I looked into it, especially for (B), but I realized that the DuckDuckHack code depends on Perl.
  - 9y ago
stephengillie 9y ago
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 9y ago
  DDG staff here - Instant Answers aren't going anywhere :)
l0b0 9y ago
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 ($X00k/year).
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > It seems by now it should be possible to run a community supported completely transparent search engine with relatively limited means ($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_ 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Can you please provide an example of this type of search?
      - godelski 9y ago
        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 9y ago
rootlocus 9y ago
> That's over 5,000 pull requests, 250,000 lines of code and hundreds of squashed bugs! I was expecting "hundreds of new bugs".
natch 9y ago
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.
- carussell 9y ago
  https://duck.co/ia https://duck.co/ia
- tagawa 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Thanks for clarifying!
denisehilton 9y ago
How can one join the Duckduckhack community. And what's the selection criteria?
- r3bl 9y ago
  You pretty much submit an instant answer or two and they add you to the duckduckhack-community group on GitHub.
avg_dev 9y ago
What was DuckDuckHack?
- kuroguro 9y ago
  Seems to be an editing community for instant answers on duckduckgo search
marvy 9y ago
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.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
This is why I'll never use another service by DuckDuckGo ever again. First they shut down DuckDuckReader and now this.
- boyter 9y ago
  I thought I was familiar with most of DDG's operations. What was DuckDuckReader? RSS reader or something?
  - stonewhite 9y ago
    That was a joke essentially ripping on people throwing fits about Google shutting down products, most famously Google Reader.
- tagawa 9y ago
  Just to clarify for those missing the joke, we don't (or didn't) have a service called DuckDuckReader. Got a nice ring to it though :-) Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff
roansh 9y ago
[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 :)

209 points by frabcus 9y ago

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"

rnhmjoj 9y ago

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

matt4077 9y ago
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?
- rnhmjoj 9y ago
  I don't know, the whole post reads like a "So long, and thanks for all the fish" to me. They don't need a community anymore because they got bigger and at this point it's just easier to close it rather than having employees taking care of the user contributions. Reddit has just pulled the plug to all their open source repositories. This will make it harder to develop and keep third party clients updated, like the ones without ads for example.
- carussell 9y ago
  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/duckduckhack_is_now_in_maintenance_mode/dmq6ilk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/6ymjj8/duckduck...
  - tagawa 9y ago
    Just to clarify, the Instant Answers will remain open source on GitHub and maintained in public. Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff
kodfodrasz 9y ago
I'm not sure how you reached this conclusion from this news, given some insider infos from other comments. Maybe you have a relevant story to tell about DDG?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Nib 9y ago

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

carussell 9y ago
I've been using Google and Wolfram Alpha for these things over the years, but it has always irked me that I'm sending this info to a third-party, to run through their services that I have no way to read or improve the code, and knowing that these things are only available to me if I'm online. I was really happy when I found out the DuckDuckGo Instant Answers modules' source code is open. It's been on my list of things that I will almost definitely never take the time to actually work on, but I wished what I had was (A) a browser extension or GNOME extension that incorporates an offline version of all the DuckDuckHack modules, and (B) the same thing in an open source mobile app. (This kind of thing could just as easily live in a command line app, though, and I'd be super happy if a project maintainer incorporated them into something like GNU Units.) I looked into it, especially for (B), but I realized that the DuckDuckHack code depends on Perl.
- 9y ago

stephengillie 9y ago

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 9y ago
DDG staff here - Instant Answers aren't going anywhere :)

l0b0 9y ago

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 9y ago
> 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_ 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Can you please provide an example of this type of search?
    - godelski 9y ago
      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 9y ago

rootlocus 9y ago

> That's over 5,000 pull requests, 250,000 lines of code and hundreds of squashed bugs! I was expecting "hundreds of new bugs".

natch 9y ago

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.

carussell 9y ago
https://duck.co/ia https://duck.co/ia
tagawa 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Thanks for clarifying!

denisehilton 9y ago

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

r3bl 9y ago
You pretty much submit an instant answer or two and they add you to the duckduckhack-community group on GitHub.

avg_dev 9y ago

What was DuckDuckHack?

kuroguro 9y ago
Seems to be an editing community for instant answers on duckduckgo search

marvy 9y ago

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.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

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

boyter 9y ago
I thought I was familiar with most of DDG's operations. What was DuckDuckReader? RSS reader or something?
- stonewhite 9y ago
  That was a joke essentially ripping on people throwing fits about Google shutting down products, most famously Google Reader.
tagawa 9y ago
Just to clarify for those missing the joke, we don't (or didn't) have a service called DuckDuckReader. Got a nice ring to it though :-) Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff

roansh 9y ago

[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 :)