DuckDuckGo Traffic

Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by JepZ on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:35AM (#18100939)

I just discovered a directory with all those 'goodies':

https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/tree/mas...

To use them you can take a look at the file and search for the term 'triggers' which should give you a hint.

Edit: Goodies seem to be just one category. The other categories can be found here: https://duck.co/ia

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by stevenjohns on Saturday September 29, 2018 @08:35PM (#18103843)

One thing I'd really like to see is translation.

Being able to write "tengo hambre en ingles" in Google and have it give me back an translation box I could interact with is awesome.

I imagine they could use Bing translation or something?

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by gbacon on Saturday September 29, 2018 @02:47PM (#18102057)

This query really takes me back.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=figlet+doh+Hi+HN&t=h_&ia=answer

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by shawn on Saturday September 29, 2018 @04:56PM (#18102765)

Does DDG have an equivalent of filetype:pdf?

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by PappaPatat on Sunday September 30, 2018 @11:10AM (#18106477)

https://duck.co/help/results/syntax

cats filetype:pdf PDFs about cats. Supported file types: pdf, doc(x), xls(x), ppt(x), html

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by clubm8 on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:00AM (#18100732)

They can also do cool stuff like currency conversion:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=10+cad+in+usd&atb=v123-2__&ia=curr...

And generate passphrases:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=7+word+passphrase&atb=v123-2__&ia=...

My killer app is the bang commands: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

!hn for hacker news !a for amazon !w for wikipedia !imdb for imdb !reddit for reddit !wa is the best for calculations and other weird stuff (ex: type in a date and find out what day of the week it was)

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by Insanity on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:40AM (#18100969)

Bang patterns are awesome!

Tip for non-English speakers

!wen for English wikipedia if your default language is something else.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by domoritz on Saturday September 29, 2018 @12:44PM (#18101308)

I use search keywords directly in my browser's address bar. Isn't going through ddg always going to be slower?

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by nvrspyx on Saturday September 29, 2018 @01:06PM (#18101465)

Well, if your browser's set search engine is DDG, !bangs can be used in the address bar. They're just shortcuts to other search engines. For example, if you wanted to search for Matt Damon on IMDB, you'd just type "!imdb matt damon" in your address bar and it'll forward the "matt damon" query to IMDB's search.

More specifically, typing "!imdb matt damon" will simply forward you to the following link: https://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=matt%20damon

----

More examples:

!a soap => https://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywo...

!hn duckduckgo => https://hn.algolia.com/?query=duckduckgo&type=story&dateRang...

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by kalleboo on Sunday September 30, 2018 @08:44AM (#18105934)

> typing "!imdb matt damon" will simply forward you to the following link

In Safari, typing "imdb matt damon" and hitting the down arrow before enter gives me the same result. Do other browsers not have site search built-in? It will also pick up search fields on any site you browse you instead of requiring it to be added to some central repository.

And I use Spotlight for calculator and unit/currency conversions. Seems wasteful to roundtrip that kind of stuff online.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by h1d on Saturday September 29, 2018 @06:11PM (#18103201)

Too bad usually the general search engines are smarter than individual sites' search engines, I don't get how it's really useful than not having the bang.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by _jomo on Saturday September 29, 2018 @04:23PM (#18102593)

I don't think Firefox on Android supports this. On Desktop it's quite useful for when you want to search a site you don't have a shortcut for. Guessing the shortcut has usually worked for me.

Also, when your search didn't give you what you were looking for, you can just prepend e.g. !g to search on Google, which for me is slightly faster than to copy the query, go to the address bar, enter "g" and then paste.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by crtasm on Saturday September 29, 2018 @07:16PM (#18103541)

Android Firefox supports both keywords for bookmarks (with %s substitution in URL) and bang searches on DDG from the address bar. I'm happy to discover this today :D

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by krispbyte on Saturday September 29, 2018 @07:06PM (#18103483)

Yes, and it sends the data to ddg, but they have tons of keywords ready to use. I usually set my most used keywords directly and let ddg take care of the rest, best of both worlds.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by singularity2001 on Saturday September 29, 2018 @12:58PM (#18101413)

same. yes we save a few milliseconds with every query that we perform;)

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by ReverseCold on Saturday September 29, 2018 @12:47PM (#18101340)

!wa Calories in a cubic lightyear of cheese

= 2.4*10^54 Cal

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by robin_reala on Saturday September 29, 2018 @12:49PM (#18101354)

Interesting question: does a black hole initially formed of a cubic lightyear of cheese retain its calorific content?

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by sonofgod on Saturday September 29, 2018 @01:28PM (#18101602)

I'm going to say no, because the black hole will be more dense than a neutron star, where chemical energy (and, more generally, chemistry) can't exist because protons and electrons fuse into neutrons.

The energy still exists, presumably, but claiming that's relevant would be like claiming a cheese at the top of a hill (potentially about to be rolled) has more calories.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by bacon_waffle on Saturday September 29, 2018 @07:15PM (#18103535)

In a previous life, I spent a lot of time backpacking, and half-jokingly made a point of stopping to eat/drink before bigger climbs. More fuel in the furnace, and less to haul up in the pack.

In that context, the cheese at the top of the hill really does have more calories or value or something along those lines.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by maxwell on Saturday September 29, 2018 @12:34PM (#18101245)

Google's currency conversion also includes a chart:

https://www.google.com/search?q=10+cad+to+usd

Not seeing any passphrase generation though.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by h1d on Saturday September 29, 2018 @06:09PM (#18103190)

When it comes to password, you're better off using some offline tool.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by orf on Saturday September 29, 2018 @06:32PM (#18103306)

Why? Because some high powered adversary is spying and decrypting all your internet traffic to find a passphrase you may or may not use in its entirety?

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by h1d on Sunday September 30, 2018 @01:14AM (#18104579)

DDG should be fine to be trusted but you don't know what kind of code produced it.

You need to worry about where the produced password is stored, how random it is and you can't prove any of it.

Generally, you can't just decrypt your traffic... there are other attack vectors.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by moollaza on Friday October 05, 2018 @11:22AM (#18148844)

Our instant answers are open source. You can see the Perl used for the passphrase Goodie here: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/mas...

We’re not storing these generated phrases anywhere.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by clubm8 on Sunday September 30, 2018 @10:21AM (#18106264)

> When it comes to password, you're better off using some offline tool.

It can be useful for low risk scenarios.

(Ex: setting up a new netflix passphrase to share with a new partner)

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by aviraldg on Saturday September 29, 2018 @03:06PM (#18102179)

If you like DDG's bang commands, you might want to check out Riot.im - it supports autocomplete for DDG searches and bang commands (and as far as I'm aware is the only IM client to do so)

/ddg <query> to try it out

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by newscracker on Saturday September 29, 2018 @01:03PM (#18101449)

The currency conversion seems to have improved. It used to require the currency and number in a specific order with specific spaces to work. Now it works with any order and spacing.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by JepZ on Saturday September 29, 2018 @10:46AM (#18100640)

I absolutely love those extensions. Another two I discovered by accident:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=colorpicker

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=calculator

I just hope the search result quality will improve over time as right now, I still use !g for about 10% of my searches.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by ape4 on Saturday September 29, 2018 @10:51AM (#18100665)

Those are neat but basically intercept traffic to websites that could easily do that sort of thing. Maybe a Hacker News user made a color picker as a side project. It would be monopolistic behavior when done by major companies.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by notjustanymike on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:22AM (#18100850)

Not really.

Color picker is a native element of most browsers.

Calculator is a CompSci 101 project.

If you're counting on either for traffic, you need a better business model.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by JepZ on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:24AM (#18100868)

On the one hand I see the issue too, but on the other hand, it is very useful, and it looks like those tools are some kind of open source collaboration:

https://duck.co/ia/view/color_picker

I don't know who controls the contributions and decides what is going to be included in the final result, but so far it looks just fine to me. After all, they still present the normal search results below the tool.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by fileeditview on Saturday September 29, 2018 @12:55PM (#18101400)

Probably said HN user should just make a better color picker then. One that provides something that others don't.

It's nice to protect the little guy but in this case.. it's just too much.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by _jal on Saturday September 29, 2018 @12:14PM (#18101124)

> It would be monopolistic behavior when done by major companies

Right. And when done by non-monopolies, we call it "competition".

What if I made a color picker that competes with your other HN-person-color-picker? How does that work? If my color picker gets a search engine feature, am I unfairly intercepting traffic from DDG?

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by mellow-lake-day on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:33PM (#18104321)

Google also has a calculator and a color picker. If you want to be mad at someone taking traffic that would be Google since they have 1000x the volume of ddg.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by nulbyte on Saturday September 29, 2018 @10:39AM (#18100591)

I have been using DDG on my laptop for a while, now. These are some great examples of what it can do that I never knew! Thanks for sharing. That said, I have regularly made use of !g when the results were absolutely horrid. Often, it is when I am looking for something frustratingly specific that is named frustratly generic. So while I understand DDG's results, Google (scarily) understands me and gives me exactly what I want even for those only-a-geek moments.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by eterm on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:09AM (#18100782)

I have a colleague who uses DDG but they frequently have to use !g to find relevant stack-overflow answers. It's not clear whether DDG is simply ranking them lower than they ought to be or if it's just google's personalisation algorithm understanding which SO answers are relevant to our job / stack.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by londons_explore on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:18AM (#18100837)

You can always open an incognito window to see if it's personalization affecting Googles results.

Surprisingly, I find the only substantial signal personalization uses is on your current location, and on results you have clicked before.

Search for 'pizza' for example, and the results will be all companies that are in your country, even if you search on Google.com.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by seandavidfisher on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:25PM (#18104299)

Is there a way to verify that a search result set is “unpersonalized?” I wouldn’t put it past Google to be able to track you even into an incognito window.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by KMag on Monday October 01, 2018 @12:37AM (#18110076)

Even the most paranoid don't think it's profitable for Google to track you through Tor, even if they've found some exploitable weakness. Try your search via Tor. Browser fingerprinting will get them little distinguishing information beyond what they get knowing you're coming from a Tor exit node.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by scaryclam on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:54AM (#18101036)

DDG has a specific SO bang, so going via google is a clue that your colleague may be poor at basic searching and not understand the tools which they use.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by eterm on Saturday September 29, 2018 @12:19PM (#18101159)

That's rude and that's not it, it's the fact that google knows which SO questions are relevant.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by user15672 on Saturday September 29, 2018 @01:22PM (#18101564)

If valid criticism is rude, we're all doomed here on HN. The parents point is valid. If you don't like it, that's fine, but rude it was not. Google doesn't know anything more than DDG, so you're just plain old wrong on that argument.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by saagarjha on Saturday September 29, 2018 @05:38PM (#18103000)

> your colleague may be poor at basic searching and not understand the tools which they use

I don't know about you, but this is pretty rude.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by themodelplumber on Saturday September 29, 2018 @10:14AM (#18100450)

A babelfish for cron! It seems years too late in some ways, yet I have a funny feeling it will remain relevant for many years to come. Thank you.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by mighty_atomic_c on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:15AM (#18100817)

For a while I committed to at least using DDG for sanitization/anonymisation of my Google searches with bangs:

  !g <query>

There is always value in trying other engines, but it's come such a long way since I've first started using it exclusively about four years ago.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by fourthark on Saturday September 29, 2018 @01:07PM (#18101474)

How does that sanitize or anonymize? It's just a redirect, so they still get your cookies, customize, serve ads etc?

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by crtasm on Saturday September 29, 2018 @07:20PM (#18103558)

Try startpage.com to actually prevent google logging your information.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by FabHK on Saturday September 29, 2018 @08:13PM (#18103782)

That's !s in DuckDuckGo, FWIW.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by aw3c2 on Saturday September 29, 2018 @02:06PM (#18101822)

For "qr hello hn" https://www.google.de/search?q=qr+hello+hn shows the perfect result below while DDG does not have it:

> Show HN: QR codes - my mini project | Hacker News > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378735 > Mar 28, 2011 - Hello HN! Check out and comment on one of my mini projects: http://coderqr.com. It's a website for the QR-uninitiated crowd to quickly make QR ...

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by stephenr on Saturday September 29, 2018 @03:11PM (#18102205)

The irony is that currently both google and ddg show this very thread as the top result for that search. DDG also happens to include a qr code for “hello hn”.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by jobigoud on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:14AM (#18100813)

You can also get random GUID: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=guid&ia=answer

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by badrabbit on Sunday September 30, 2018 @09:56AM (#18106172)

Yes,there was a time when results were not good enough,these days I only use google if my query isn't direct or if a I need to search for individuals(due to how little they care about privacy,searching email addresses anf names is still ideal in google)

Ddg also has 'bangs'. For example !whois looks up a whois record,!b searches it in bing and !translate translates via google translate. They havr many more :-)

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by C4K3 on Saturday September 29, 2018 @10:56AM (#18100697)

That's cool, I had no idea DDG had that many 'extensions' (or whatever they call them.) Is there a complete list somewhere?

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by tonyedgecombe on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:01AM (#18100734)

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by C4K3 on Saturday September 29, 2018 @02:49PM (#18102071)

I meant the 'goodies' like the calculator.

JepZ posted this link above https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/tree/mas...

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by Jabbermonkey on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @12:48PM (#18123355)

How about the Instant Answers list on DuckDuckGo Community? https://duck.co/ia

It has a filter for the goodies along with other good stuff.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by linkmotif on Saturday September 29, 2018 @10:25AM (#18100512)

DDG is a most important project! But I like GCHQ Cyberchef for this kind of thing, but also the node REPL or browser tools console REPL are good. Nice to have everything in one spot versus different tools based on search input.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by severine on Saturday September 29, 2018 @02:11PM (#18101854)

For those like me, who didn't know: https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by SpaceGorilla on Saturday September 29, 2018 @03:05PM (#18102176)

Im always pleasantly surprised when I do a search expecting to have to click a site to get the answer, only to have ddg show me the results(a lot of time with a nice widget)

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by bitL on Saturday September 29, 2018 @04:38PM (#18102669)

Try to search for "duckduckgo t-shirt" ;-)

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by laacz on Sunday September 30, 2018 @04:01PM (#18108068)

Although I want to, it's hard to justify shipping price of 17$ over t-shirt price of 10$.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by Natsu on Saturday September 29, 2018 @11:18PM (#18104285)

The biggest problem is that once everyone switches, it will get manipulated like Google and the cycle will repeat :(

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by dljsjr on Saturday September 29, 2018 @10:13AM (#18100445)

The crontab parser is a thing of beauty

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by osrec on Saturday September 29, 2018 @08:29PM (#18103826)

Nice, very tempted to give it a try. How do you find the ddg search experience on mobile?

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by m-p-3 on Saturday September 29, 2018 @08:34PM (#18103840)

I switched to it on Firefox mobile, works well enough for day to day stuff IMO. And if you need to quickly do a Google search you can use the !g bang operator as a prefix and it will redirect to google.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by urda on Saturday September 29, 2018 @03:44PM (#18102380)

OK, that crontab one is pretty great.

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Re:DuckDuckGo Traffic by samirm on Saturday September 29, 2018 @06:13PM (#18103212)

the first and the last examples don't do anything for me :/

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