DuckDuckGo Goodies

[null_ptr]

It looks like a a bunch of the goodies are user-made. I had no idea DuckDuckGo was so open to developers [1], what a nice surprise!

[1] http://duckduckhack.com/

[cainetighe]

DuckDuckHack is a major component of DuckDuckGo's future. It's great when developers, well versed in an answer space, come in and make a goodie because the value spreads across the user base. As DDH grows, it will be neat to think of as a standard library for future contributors to work with. For example a mortgage specific calculator leveraging the generic calculator.

[cinquemb]

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

[tytso]

Um, I'm sure the NSA would be happy to implement a strong password generator if you asked nicely. Seriously, if we aren't willing to trust the NSA to generate strong passwords for us, is it really a good idea to trust DDG (or any remote web service) to generate a strong password?

[_zekiel]

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.

[vertex-four]

> it really a good idea to trust DDG (or any remote web service) to generate a strong password?

Probably not, but for ease of use, I've used it a couple of times to generate temporary passwords that users are forced to change on login.

[JoshTriplett]

I often find myself guessing at some of the DDG goodies or !bang searches, and more often than not the thing I want already exists.

I wish the !bang searches in particular were more discoverable, though. Perhaps if you search for "foo site:bar", or "foo bar" where bar is a well-known site or service, DDG should suggest 'Try "foo !bar" or "!bar foo" to ...".

[a3n]

I too have had trouble finding where the bang codes are.

I think the easiest is this: Go to the ddg home page, click on the drop down to the right of the search field, and at the bottom of that is "By category (!bang)"

Click that and you'll go to https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

Or you could just remember duckduckgo.com/bang :)

[garretraziel]

If you try next.duckduckgo.com and type "!", it automatically shows all bangs you can use.

[navpatel]

How did the pass up on the opportunity to call this DuckDuckGoodies?

[genericuser]

They are calling it DuckDuckGoodies if you click through to the page.

(I admittedly can't be certain they were an hour ago when you asked.)

[tantalor]

I made one of these about 2 years ago. It displays the descriptions of UN numbers, those little codes you see on trucks transporting nasty chemicals.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=UN+1993

Perl module: https://github.com/tantalor/perl-Number-UN

DDG module: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/mas...

It was very nice to work with the DDG people to get this integrated.

[svmaris]

The IMDB example in the Entertainment section is showing a pretty weird result for "Shawshank Redemption". Instead of the well known movie, the highlighted result is an episode of a quite obscure TV series ("Dating a Puppet").

-- Edit: I've just noticed the query goes straight to imdbapi.com, which returns the same results when searching for "Shawshank Redemption", without the "The" prefix. Which is still a bit weird, but has nothing to do with DDG.

[_zekiel]

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

[Geekette]

Very cool. DDG should consider displaying the goodies page as default for beginners, with choice to collapse the section in favour of the plain page if desired. It would encourage more experimentation and additions. Suggesting it because even a regular user like myself had no idea this page existed, much less a newbie.

[_zekiel]

Duly noted! It's been relatively hard to discover so we're working on that for the next version of DDG. Really appreciate the feedback in-favor!

[fransr]

Found a security issue with the Goodies (XSS at duckduckgo.com). I just posted it through your feedback form "I found a bug", hope that reaches the right people.

[_zekiel]

Thanks! Looking for it now.

[derefr]

I'm sad to see that the "hash" goodie just identifies the type of the hash. It'd sure be nice if some web-crawler index or another would hash the documents it crawled before throwing them away--then you could search arbitrary web-resources by hash, the same way you can currently search images by image-fingerprint. (And such a feature, in "I Feel Lucky" mode, would effectively turn the entire web into a DHT.)

[VaucGiaps]

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=unix+time+1400000000

[gabriel34]

What is this? GET?

[steve_benjamins]

Awesome. An easy interface explaining each goodie.

Such a simple idea- and yet I've never seen Google figure something like this out. I mean I'm sure it's buried somewhere in Google's technical docs, but those docs don't qualify as easy interfaces.

Well done DuckDuckGo!

[quotient]

This is awesome. They've managed to identify many little utilities that users need occasionally. Google has a similar set of utilities, but it is only accessible through the search-bar, and you need to know what you're looking for. DDG's is much easier to browse/use.

[_zekiel]

These come from our open source instant answers platform: http://duckduckhack.com/

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.

[sepbot]

I don't like that the generated UUID has uppercase letters.

[kudu]

Since the link links to the Cryptography section, that should be part of the post title.

[akennberg]

Couldn't find any Bitcoin goodies. That's surprising!

[rsl7]

There's a new one!

https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=bitcoin+eur

[ing33k]

awesome ! can the plugins be written in any language ? or is it just perl ?

[draegtun]

From the DuckDuckGo Goodie FAQ:

What if I don't know Perl?

If you don't know Perl, that's OK! Some instant answer types (Fathead, Longtail) don't require the use of Perl. Also, if you know PHP, Ruby, or Python you should be able to write a Goodie in Perl pretty easily using this awesome cheat sheet.

ref: https://duck.co/duckduckhack/faq#goodie

So DDG Goodie plugins can only be written in Perl.

[aw3c2]

Page seems not to work correctly with Javascript disabled.

[LukeB_UK]

Nowadays you can't realistically expect to browse the internet with Javascript disabled.

[rquirk]

You can use them without javascript too, if you know the shortcut. e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=qrcode%20http%3A%2F%2Fddg.gg%...

[Sir_Cmpwn]

So enable Javascript.

[raldi]

It also doesn't work well if you have HTML disabled.