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?
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.
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
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.
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
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/
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 :)
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 :\
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
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
We open sourced our instant answers platform a couple years ago, in the hope to get more eyeballs on them (for quality and quantity): http://duckduckhack.com/
It might not address your point but any underlying flaws (randomness, etc) can be caught/fixed by the community.
So, anyone can suggest or create instant answers and it works out better that they're open source, since people who are most passionate about a topic (movies, legos, pokemon, gardening, etc) will know the best sources for it and the best information to display.
--the !bangs are already categorized and it sounds like you're looking for a way to see which !bangs might apply to your search (for better results). ~explore mode. Would the suggestion of making them searchable by category be a good solution or something even different?
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?
What content would you be most interested in following?
"paging epi0Bauqu!"